Dir: George P. Cosmatos
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoft
Run time: 96 Minutes
I recently finished David Morrell’s novel First Blood, the story that gave birth to the Rambo character. It’s a dark, meticulously crafted tale of survival against tremendous odds. It also dives headfirst into the murky topic of post-Vietnam trauma and resentment towards veterans trying to re-adjust to civilian life.
The cinematic adaptation was a war movie set in idyllic middle America. Only one person dies in the movie, yet the stakes are high. You want to see Rambo escape from asshole sheriff Will Teasle and his boorish police force. He was a sympathetic character, a cipher for a generation of broken, forgotten men who had endured the horrors of war.
If First Blood told a cautionary tale of war, Rambo: First Blood Part II utterly revels in conflict. All sense of nuance is evaporated here, replaced with thundering bombast, a high score kill count and iconic action movie imagery for the ages. It feels like a video game by comparison, and that’s not really a bad thing for the best part.
The movie picks up some time after First Blood, with decorated veteran John Rambo (Stallone) serving a jail sentence breaking rocks in a quarry. His old commanding officer Trautman (Crenna) emerges, offering his student a get out of jail free card. All he has to do is pull off one final mission back in Vietnam.
Like First Blood, Stallone acts well in this movie. When Rambo learns the price of his freedom is to return to the source of his pain, you can see his eyes dull over and the haunting spectre of war wash over him again. As the movie’s stakes and kill count escalate, his sadness slowly evolves into blood curdling rage.
As much as he’d hate to admit it by the end of the movie Rambo has finally come home to where he feels most human, most comfortable, most… alive: the battlefield.
But before we get there, Rambo gets his mission brief from a bureaucratic asshole called Murdock (Napier). He’s no Will Teasle but he does represent something very real. Where Teasle embodied contempt for Vietnam veterans, Murdock stands for the appalling belief that soldiers are expendable. He sees Rambo and his kind as pawns, tools, blunt instruments to get the mission done.
On the flip side you have Trautman in an advisory role throughout Rambo’s mission, acting again as a surrogate father figure who understands his student best.
Rambo’s mission is to confirm that American soldiers are still being held prisoner by Vietnamese soldiers, over a decade after the war ended. He has to take photographic evidence then report back to base. Without spoiling the plot, things go off the rails, leaving Rambo captured deep behind enemy lines.
This is a lean movie that doesn’t feel like its running time. That’s both a blessing and a curse. When you consider the methodical pacing and solid structure of the first movie, Part II feels like levels of a video game, zipping along at breakneck speed, while shoehorning in a janky and forced love subplot. The whole thing feels rushed and overly simplistic.
Things improve once Rambo is capture by Russian forces in league with the Vietnamese army. There’s an infamous torture scene that gets pretty nasty, and it’s not long after that the movie gives us the big pay off we’ve been waiting for – Rambo finally snapping and showing us the warrior legend that was referenced in the first movie, but never fully witnessed.
The final few sequences are outstanding, as Rambo unleashes hell on a foolish amount of troops. He takes them down with his now-iconic explosive arrows, stealthily dispatches soldiers by blending into nature, and other techniques. We also get a great stand off with a chopper and nice smatterings of 18-rates gore to add to the absurdity.
Even though I have a nostalgic soft spot for this movie, I’d be remiss to say it didn’t have problems. Stallone and Crenna really do put in the work here, and are good value. Everyone else ranges from okay to downright awful. The love story is also embarrassingly cheesy and forced.
But, overlooking all of this and the wafer thin plot, there are some incredible practical effects, vehicular moments, gunplay and truly insane explosions. The iconic scene of Stallone letting rip with a chaingun as his ludicrous frame shakes, while unleashing a pained roar is one for the ages – in some ways it’s the banner image for the action genre and its archetypal flavour of hero at that point in the particular decade of the ’80s.
One can only wonder where Rambo: Last Blood will take the weary hero and what he’ll stand for in 2019. At this point, it’s anyone’s guess.
Final Score: 7 reloads out of 10
Pros:
- The practical effects are great, with some insane explosions, squib-work and coherent action.
- Stallone is great in this again. His passionate closing speech is almost the full stop that completes his arc from First Blood.
- Crenna and Napier are also good value.
- That Rambo theme never fails to get the blood pumping
- The interrogation scene and the closing action crescendo are great
Cons:
- Rambo’s love story is forced and feels hammier than a bag of pork scratchings
- The love interests acting is really poor, but that feels more down to her underwritten dialogue
- The plot really is wafer thin, you could write it all down on a pub beer coaster
- There’s less exploration of Rambo’s psyche and character here.
The Hipfire 