Sylvester Stallone fell into the trap of the characters he created for himself in the 80s. A smart and surprisingly articulate man, he was stuck playing monosyllabic tough guys in films that could never be as smart as he wanted them to be.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Rambo III, released on May 25, 1988, which he intended as a political and moral meditation on war but found that much of its running time was taken up by explosions, squibs and shots of his brilliant footage . chest muscles. The character of John Rambo first appeared on screen in the 1982 film First Blood, which took David Morrell’s stripped-down action film and turned it into a bloody tale of American consciousness in the wake of the Vietnam War.
The results were much more interesting than almost all modern action films. Co-written by Stallone and made for $15 million, it became a huge hit, grossing 10 times its budget at the box office.
This led to the 1985 sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, in which the famous Vietnam War veteran returned to rescue American prisoners of war. Stallone found that the early draft, written by James Cameron, did not deal enough with politics, and so he rewrote parts of it to emphasize what he said in a 2006 Q&A was Rambo’s “apparent neutrality”—as opposed to his superiors.” “right” beliefs.
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He tried to embody this in the character’s final speech in the film, which was about Vietnam veterans wanting their country to love them as much as they loved it. Stallone added that he was aware that the speech “could have resulted in millions of viewers bursting the veins in their eyeballs due to excessive rolling of their eyeballs.” However, the film was a box office success and became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s.
With this success, the famed production team of Mario Cassar and Andrew J. Vine of Carolco Pictures immediately began work on the third film. The question in this new film was what kind of war Rambo would end up in. The national obsession with the Vietnam War was fading, and so the choice was made to have the story take place in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union was conducting its own military operations at the time. a horrifyingly bloody undertaking.
The plot of Rambo III centers on Rambo’s loyal commander, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), who is captured by a notoriously brutal Soviet commander.
This requires rescuing Rambo, who ends up supporting the Afghan Mujahideen freedom fighters in the area, rescuing Trautman, and defeating the Soviet commander by driving a tank into a helicopter piloted by the bad guy.
In typical Stallone fashion, the project began with grander ambitions than it ended with. He later revealed that the original idea for the script was much closer to Bruce Willis’s 2003 film Tears of the Sun, which told the story of a team of Navy SEALs caught between the orders of their callous superior officers and the dictates of their conscience.
Stallone scrapped a version of the script he hired Bullitt screenwriter Harry Kleiner to write and ended up writing it himself along with Sheldon Lettich, who rose to fame writing the Jean-Claude Van Damme action film Bloodsport. The version they eventually created is less a meditation on global conflict and more a chance for Rambo to kill the bad guys with everything from a 10-inch knife to a compound bow that shoots exploding arrows.
Rambo III also suffered from numerous production difficulties.
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Stallone initially cast Russell Mulcahy, best known for Highlander, as director and then fired him. The incident was explained in his typically colorful manner by Stallone in 2008, when he noted that he had sent Mulcahy to Israel (where the film was going to be filmed) to cast actors to play tough Soviet soldiers, only to arrive himself to find that Mulcahy had cast “two dozen blond blue-eyed cute boys who look like surfers” and was not intimidated by John Rambo. Disappointed with this choice, Stallone summarily fired Mulcahy and “his chiffon army.”
His replacement was Peter MacDonald, a celebrated second unit cinematographer and director who had worked on everything from Cabaret to Zulu Dawn to The Empire Strikes Back. Macdonald was an expert at fitting into the existing vision, as the second unit director’s role was to shoot sequences that were indistinguishable from the work of the main director. He also shared Stallone’s ability to be irreverent about his work, recalling in 2013 that he “didn’t do Shakespeare, and it was hard to take [Rambo III] seriously at times.” After returning to Arizona to finish the film due to the difficulties of filming in Israel, Rambo III was completed.
As always happened with Stallone, it was turned into a movie with lots of explosions and almost endless machine gun fire sequences, and vanishingly little character development or philosophizing.
By this point, even Stallone seemed resigned to his destiny as a muscle-bound, violent guy. In a 1988 interview with Roger Ebert, he noted with a smile that audiences might find the film “unrealistic.”
Beyond that, it seemed that no matter how smart he was, no matter how eager he was to emphasize that “war is the most vile of all human agents,”
Stallone’s audience was only interested in one thing.
“They’re here to take action,” he told Ebert. “They expected a fix at the end of the film. If there came a point in the script where I had the opportunity to find a spot, you could hear people in front of their VCRs: Fast forward, that mom!”
As happens with many actors, he started by creating a character. Then Sylvester Stallone discovered that this character was the only thing his audience wanted.
Stallone’s audience was only interested in one thing.
“They’re here to take action,” he told Ebert. “They expected a fix at the end of the film. If there came a point in the script where I had the opportunity to find a spot, you could hear people in front of their VCRs: Fast forward, that mom!”
As happens with many actors, he started by creating a character. Then Sylvester Stallone discovered that this character was the only thing his audience wanted.