As far as franchises go, the five-film run featuring Sylvester Stallone’s stoic killing machine John Rambo is one of the strangest. First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff and adapted from the novel by David Morrell, stars Stallone as a traumatized loner just looking for a place to rest seven years after Vietnam. Running afoul of some biased local lawmen who don’t like his hippie look and vagrant vibe, Rambo uses his training and a heaping dose of PTSD to fight back, culminating in a heartbreaking breakdown by Stallone as Rambo remembers returning home from war to face scorn and protester spit. First Blood was as complicated and prescient as it was violent, but in the wake of its monster box office something weird happened; Hollywood saw dollar signs not in the message but in the image of an extremely shirtless Stallone wielding a machine gun.
In the sequels that followed, the action got bigger, Stallone kept getting wider, and the body count grew by the dozens.
But even though a lot of the franchise has aged like fine milk, you can’t discount the character’s impact on the action genre. For many, the image of the huge-budget 1980s shoot-em-up set in one jungle or the other is synonymous with the word “Rambo”, and Stallone’s sweatband-and-dead-eyes look is action iconography as enduring as The Terminator’s leather jacket and John McClane’s sweaty tank.
With John Rambo returning to theaters for, presumably, the final time in Rambo: Last Blood, we’re taking a look at the franchise and seeing how each movie stacks up. Check out our ranking below, which now includes Last Blood.
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5. Rambo: Last Blood
Remember in 2015 when Ryan Coogler’s Creed masterfully demonstrated how to reintroduced a classic Stallone character gracefully, thoughtfully, and in a way that carefully examined but didn’t diminish the past? Imagine the complete, total opposite of all that, add in a healthy portion of racism, and you’ve got yourself Rambo: Last Blood. The plot, for what it’s worth, which is very little: John Rambo is doing his best to live a life of quiet solitude and fancy horse tricks on his family ranch, spending his free time digging tunnels beneath the ground that don’t appear to serve any actual purpose. His reason for keeping a lid on his violent past is his niece, Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), who wants to find her biological father in Mexico.
Despite Rambo’s sheer confusion at doing something terrifying like “go to Mexico”—”Why would you want to do that?” he asks, way before Gabrielle mentions her father—Gabrielle crosses the border, an event director Adrian Grunberg frames like entering the hell-fires of Mordor. In less than 12 hours, Gabrielle is drugged and sold into sex slavery, leaving it up to John Rambo to hammer his way through several meat sacks to save his niece.
Except he doesn’t. Gabrielle just dies after four days of torture and rape, giving Rambo motivation for about 20 minutes of the most uninspired revenge-action you’ve ever seen in your life. Last Blood doesn’t even have the benefits of Part II or III, where you at least
get some good ol’ fun, 1980s-style pyrotechnic displays. You don’t even get horses! This movie makes such a point to tell you both Rambo and Gabrielle are talented horse riders, and then Rambo just lets the horses go before the final showdown. What’s left is Stallone heavy-breathing his way through those dimly lit tunnels, dropping spikes on faceless Cartel members and, at one point, blowing a man’s head completely off his shoulders before shooting him in the chest for good measure. It’s not even mindless fun, it’s just…mindless. I would say I have no idea who this movie is for but there are still people who think building a wall along the Mexico/America border is a sensible, realistic plan, so there you go.
4) Rambo: First Blood Part II
Pretty much everything about the first Rambo sequel—from the nonsensical title that makes John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum sound like smooth jazz all the way up—is dumb as rocks. Rambo is released from prison following the events of First Blood to document possible POWs in Vietnam. The military thinks it’s a non-issue they’d like to sweep under the rug, but John Rambo has other, more violent ideas; the Soviets show up, someone makes the grievous mistake of drawing first blood, and John Rambo basically does a one-man re-do of the Vietnam War but this time America wins, bay-bay. Now, for some, the dumbness has become an acceptable par for the course when you’re dealing with these films;
the “what did you expect from a Rambo movie?” crowd. I can’t deny First Blood Part II’s that pyrotechnics and machine bullet sprays are impressively over-the-top, and I’ll never fully write off a movie that brought the world this GIF of Sylvester Stallone firing a machine gun straight up in the air. But the issue with Part II is that it still thinks it has the brains of First Blood, despite the fact it’s not self-aware enough to notice it turned its weary wandering soul into a bulked-up Reagan-era wet dream mowing down faceless baddies in the jungle.
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3) Rambo III
Rambo III is by far the most ehhhhhhh of the franchise in terms of John Rambo machine-gunning the shit out of people in the name of ‘Merica, but it earns points over its predecessor for leaning all the way into what the character had become. I cannot possibly stress enough how wide Sylvester Stallone is in this movie. Rambo looks like an oil tanker with legs. His hair deserves its own IMDB credit. My dude achieves a level of shirtlessness in this movie that went unmatched for 31 years until the premiere of Hobbs & Shaw. The film sees John Rambo once again trying to live a quiet life of solitude—in this case, that means competing in competitive stick fights in Bangkok—when his old buddy Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna) pulls him back into service. This time around, it’s Soviet-occupied Afghanistan,
where Rambo helps the local mujahideen beat back the ruthless Colonel Alexei Zaysen (Marc de Jonge) in his quest to take over the country. (Yes, 2019 Brain, this does mean John Rambo might’ve been fighting on the same side as Osama Bin Laden; the hypotheticals surrounding this plot are Not Great, Bob.) At the time, Rambo III was the most expensive film ever made and it shows. In terms of pure spectacle, this film is a doozy. The whole enterprise is elevated by a genuinely thrilling third-act cavalry-against-tank set-piece that calls to mind the best parts of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, if Indiana Jones did roughly 10,000 more bicep curls a day.
2) Rambo
When John Rambo was introduced to audiences in First Blood, it was with one (1) on-screen kill. In the simply-titled sequel Rambo, debuting 26 years later, that kill count jumped up a bit to 254. Rambo is an absurdly violent movie. Bodies turn to bloody mist-clouds thanks to well-placed squibs, limbs get hacked by the dozen, a child gets tossed into a burning building, and Rambo quite literally machine-guns a man into mush. Rambo reaches such heights of gore and gunfire that it basically becomes a parody of a Rambo movie. But my reading—and I hope it’s not a generous one! [NOTE: After seeing Last Blood, I think it might’ve been]—is that is exactly the point.
The fact Stallone himself directed and that the film arrived so many years later paints the over-the-top violence as a message: John Rambo cannot escape. Days, weeks, decades, there will come a time when some new battle comes crashing back into John Rambo’s solitude, and the image of the vet mowing down body after body in the Burmese jungle is an almost supernatural look at a war that can’t ever end. Yeah, Rambo gives the character a “happy” ending as he walks toward his family ranch, but after 90 minutes of the most unpleasantly blood-splattered movie you can imagine, “happy” can only last so long.
