Generally
speaking, Sylvester Stallone seems to have two extremes on his acting spectrum.
On the one end you have Rocky Balboa, the kind-hearted boxer who wants to woo
the love of his life. Then at the other end of the spectrum you have John
Rambo, the one-man army who will play chicken with an attack helicopter while
driving a tank in the Afghan desert. Rambo’s movie franchise has been pretty
uneven, with the character becoming more and more of a ruthless killer with no
personality with each awkwardly titled entry: First Blood, First Blood Part II, Rambo III, and Rambo. The first entry however stands
out by introducing the character as a remnant of the Vietnam War with nowhere
to go now that the fighting is over.
The character has
become so synonymous with being the ultimate badass that I more or less knew
what Rambo stood for before seeing any of the movies. The image of Stallone all
jacked up with that bandana on his head while holding a machine gun became
emblematic in the 1980s. It was in turn effectively parodied in the 1990s by
Charlie Sheen in Hot Shots: Part Deux,
and there is indeed a lot to parody here. The name alone oozes machismo. RAM –
BO: the word is like a battering ram. It’s hard to imagine a mild-mannered
accountant with that name. Before the (supposedly) last chapter came out in
2008 I started renting the other movies in the franchise while at the
University of Sherbrooke, and even the DVDs are all pumped up. They aren’t just
Special Edition DVDs, they are Ultimate Edition with special “Survival Mode”
that allows the viewer to see details about Rambo’s guns and how he analyzes a
threat. I should have brought this to University’s film club so we could make
fun of it like an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
Made in 1982 and
directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff, First
Blood starts off rather peacefully with Vietnam War veteran John Rambo
entering the small town of Hope, Washington, to find a friend from the war. His
dishevelled look attracts the attention of Sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy)
who takes him for just another drifter. He gives Rambo a lift out of town and
advises him to hit the road, but when Rambo disobeys he arrests him for
vagrancy.
At the police
station Teasle’s deputies (including a young David Caruso) give Rambo a hard
time when he refuses to cooperate. Their bullying evoke flashbacks of him being
captured and tortured in Vietnam, until he finally snaps and beats up everyone
in the room. He escapes into the woods and from there the chase is on. After
Rambo accidentally kills one of Teasle’s men, the sheriff vows to take him down.
However Teasle
soon realizes Rambo is no mere drifter. Using guerrilla tactics and booby
traps, Rambo easily disables his men, so Teasle calls in the state police and
even the National Guard. Enter United States Special Forces Colonel Sam
Trautman (Richard Crenna) who warns him it might be safer to let Rambo cool
off. Trautman trained Rambo, not just as a member of the Special Forces, but as
a guy you send to rescue the army when there is no one left. Undeterred, Teasle
decides to press on. It’s his funeral.
As an action
movie, this is truly a product of its time with the actors shooting on location
in the Canadian woods and amazing stunts such as Stallone hanging off a cliff
while a helicopter takes shots at Rambo. The third act goes all out with Rambo
perforating the town with an M60 machine gun as he declares all out war.
If the
screenwriters, one of whom is Stallone, were trying to say war veterans should
not be tossed aside, they were not being too subtle about it. If anything this
movie could give civilians nightmares about super soldiers going at war in
their small towns when the P.T.S.D makes them snap. This is probably why in the
next movies Rambo was once again dropped in war zones so he could unleash hell
on the bad guys and not on the home front.
Still, the stunts
are old-school, Stallone is in top physical shape, and he makes you care about
Rambo when he finally opens up about the horrors of the war. The Rambo
franchise might be uneven, but First
Blood is appropriately locked and loaded.
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