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Rambo: First Blood Part II


#13 - Rambo: First Blood Part II
George P. Cosmastos, 1985



After being arrested at the end of First Blood, John Rambo is recruited by Col. Trautman as part of a recon mission into Vietnam searching for P.O.W. camps but of course things go wrong very, very quickly.

I still find it rather weird that Sylvester Stallone was able to take not one but two of his most serious films and spin both of them into multi-film franchises that very quickly devolved into the sort of silliness that the source films worked so hard to avoid. First Blood was a decent enough little story about a Vietnam veteran acting out the only way he knew how against a violent, uncaring society - it definitely wasn't an action ride. Part II also attempts to deliver some sort of message due to its plot involving rescuing long-forgotten P.O.W.s, but that does get a little lost in this film that seems almost like a cinematic attempt to retroactively win the Vietnam War. Also, wasn't the "traumatised vet goes back to Vietnam to rescue long-forgotten P.O.W.s" plot already used in Chuck Norris' Missing in Action?

Stallone and his "distinctive" brand of charisma dominate the film and it's not like we're watching this film for the other actors. Richard Crenna still plays Trautman with the same air of reason that made the character good, but Steven Berkoff seems to be recycling the same vicious Russian military character he played in Octopussy, and he wasn't much good there either. Charles Napier is serviceable as the unreliable mission control, but Julia Nickson-Soul doesn't get much to do beyond serving as Stallone's contact and

WARNING: "Rambo: First Blood Part II" spoilers below
his eventual (almost inevitable) love interest, which is handled really badly because she gets shot to death mere seconds after finally kissing him, which really does feel like something out of a bad parody.


The action, well, it's serviceable, I guess. There's a lot of explosions and a lot of bad guys get killed in a variety of ways, but none of it feels particularly engaging. Faceless goons getting mowed down with machine guns? Yawn. Sure, using arrows tipped with explosives is inventive, but I get tired of that quickly. Not even the fact that it's all so comically serious about everything serves to provide any unintentional comedy value. Even so, I can't hate it but it's very lacking in terms of enjoyment.