Movie Report: Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); Rambo III (1988), Rambo (2008)

Well, after picking these up at an estate sale a couple weeks ago, I thought maybe I would wait until I got a copy of First Blood to watch the series from the beginning, but I did not. I watched them not quite on consecutive nights, but enough to have them very fresh in mind as I moved to the next. I read the novels in 2008 (see First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II).

So: In Rambo: First Blood Part II, Colonel Trautman gets Rambo out of prison (for his actions in the first movie) on a covert mission into Vietnam to scout a prison camp that might hold American POWs. He is not to engage the enemy, though–only to confirm the presence of POWs, and a Delta Team will get them out. But while the government official running the op, Murdoch, expected the camp to be empty, the Vietnamese have rotated in prisoners, and Rambo liberates one and brings him to the extraction/exfil point. When Murdoch hears that, he aborts the mission before pickup, leaving Rambo to his fate. Rambo then breaks out with the help of his Vietnamese contact played by Julia Nickson and delivers the POWs of the camp to Murdoch.

The film would have been a scant decade after the end of the war, so it was still pretty fresh in the American zeitgeist (it was the topic of many films and television programs for quite some time). It had a couple of different acts to it and even a bit of depth to it. It’s not just jingoism; parts of the government (maybe all of it) are suspect and have their own agendas contrasting with that of the common man or soldier.

Rambo III, on the other hand–well, it lacks depth. It is a bit more….. jingoistic? It spends too much of its runtime explaining the gallant people of Afghanistan, those plucky guerrillas fighting against the Soviet menace. Trautman finds Rambo living in an ashram after the events of the second movie and stick-fighting for a little extra cash for the monks, and he invites Rambo to join him on an expedition into Afghanistan to find why one sector is particularly good at blocking arms shipments. Rambo demurs, but When Trautman is captured, he reconsiders and basically single-handedly invades a fortress. Well, he does have an Afghan guide and a child warrior for company, and the mujahideen do ride the rescue, but it’s overly simple and more comic-book/action movie than the others.

This film must have come on Showtime fresh right before we moved out of the trailer park, as I’ve seen it several times. But the only things that stuck with me were the opening scene and the cauterizing a wound with gundpowder scene. And my boys have not seen it, they have seen two films which parodied it: Hot Shots! Part Deux and UHF (which includes a parody of it in one of George’s daydreams).

Jeez, though, when you think that in a shorter span of time than the gap between Vietnam and the first (and second) films that the United States would be the target of those “gallant” freedom fighters. Life comes at you pretty fast especially in retrospect.

Rambo (don’t think too hard about the series numbering and naming convention) takes place 20 years later. Rambo is still living in southeast Asia. The Burmese civil war is raging–we get some expository footage to start the film–and a group of Christians is hoping to go up river to deliver medicine and hope to a persecuted Christian village, and they want to hire Rambo and his boat to take them. He demurs, but the woman of the group convinces him to help. So he takes them up river and protects them from pirates on the way. After they disembark, they’re captured by the local warlord who razes the village in the manner of Ghengis Khan. Rambo learns this when another member of their ministry arrives and commissions Rambo to ferry a team of mercenaries up river to find them. And he ends up taking a more active role in the rescue despite the mercenary leader dismissing him as just “the boat guy.”

This film, too, has some depth to it. Rambo is older, a bit more jaded and tired, but he has some attraction to the woman in the group which cannot be returned because she is, apparently, the fiancee of the group leader. And at the end, when they’re safe, she runs to him while Rambo watches from a distance. And Rambo returns to his hometown at the end of the film to reconcile with his father and/or family.

The shots are more dramatic as well–the 80s oranges have been washed out by the darkness of 21st century filmmaking, but Stallone, also the director, put some thought into them. Its effects are more gory than the 80s spot of blood and belly clutching–one online source said it was to maximize the effects budget because fake blood is cheap–but comparing other similar films from across those decades (see also On All The Conan Movies–so far) shows that it’s just how movies are made these days.

One thing to note about the films: They have mostly or all male casts. Rambo: First Blood Part II has the contact in Vietnam; Rambo III has a couple of extras amongst the Afghan tribespeople. Rambo has the woman who is on the missionary team and some extras. Very male dominated films, and I only note it because I know you want to see photos of the pretty actresses in them, and all you get is Julia Nickson.

She is from Singapore, with an English father and a Chinese mother, so she did not look especially Vietnamese, but the character she plays in the film is the daughter of someone who worked for an intelligence agency, so perhaps that fits into the character concept–the children of Western fathers and Vietnamese mothers did a bad time of it after the war–see this and this if you didn’t know, and understand racism better in all its forms, child.

Her most active period was in the late 1980s and 1990s, but she’s been in a number of television programs and movies through the years. She was also married to David Soul, the singer who was also known as Hutch.