The Gulf of America
Until I was well into my thirties, the only Stallone movie I’d ever seen was Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot. I gave the Rocky and the Rambo franchises a clean miss, though growing up in the 1980s, they were part of my upbringing anyway. Rambo and Rocky lived in the iconography all around me, without ever bothering my eyeballs directly. Oddly, I was pretty much completely on board with Schwarzenegger and Willis at the time; it was only Stallone to whom I gave an inadvertent cold shoulder.
A few years back I won the Rocky movies on blu-ray and watched the lot of them over a couple of days, and enjoyed myself so thoroughly in doing so that I figured I probably oughta tear the Rambo movies off my “missed” list at some point as well. This week, for no particularly good reason other than that they were on Netflix, I went for it. To skip to the end: they’re neither as good nor as fun as their fraternal franchise; but yeah, I still think there oughta be a Rambo: Last Blood. And I’ll be first in line for Creed, too.
Like most people coming to the Rambo movies late, I suppose the biggest surprise watching First Blood for the first time, beyond the simple fact that it’s actually a really good movie, is how completely outside the popular conception of “Rambo” the first film’s portrayal of the main character sits. First Blood is basically a movie about a Vietnam vet who goes completely crazy in the woods in the Pacific Northwest and wages a one-man war against the local police who have been set to apprehend him. He does this by setting various traps and devices, and living like the manifest vengeance of the mountain made flesh. I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I knew about the “Rambo/traps” connection, but everything else about this movie, from the tone down, was a surprise. It’s a flashy, silly premise made effective by the commitment of all involved, and it’s shot like a brick shithouse by Toronto director Ted Kotcheff in the woods around Vancouver – so as far as I’m concerned, it’s a Canadian film, and I’m taking it back.
The action sequences are cunning and drip with the kind of gasoline showmanship that made higher-end exploitation pictures in the early ‘80s the standard-bearers of the pre-CGI world. And Stallone’s terrific in it, which helps. Rambo in First Blood is the anti-Rocky; if Balboa’s internal switch is set to “open,” Rambo’s is on “closed.” The inciting incident for all this is some police harassment and brutality towards Rambo, who is just drifting quietly through town, looking up old war buddies. The police behaviour might have seemed heavy-handed in 1982, but blazes past in a hailstorm of verisimilitude in 2014. We know what police are actually for in this day and age, and the only thing that sticks out is the fact that Rambo is white – although if he’d been black, I suppose Dennehy would have just opened fire on him in the street instead of offering him a ride out of town. I have no idea what the police are meant to represent in First Blood’s contemporary political construct, but it plays fine today – and scoff all you want, and rudimentary as they may be, the Rambo movies are politicized to a frequently painful degree. In First Blood, the text is more honest, built around the homefront treatment of Vietnam vets; and the film does a better job of it overall than Born on the Fourth of July (though so would most schoolchildren writing term papers). The only odd notes play out in the change in moral perspective on America’s iconic uniformed servants over the course of the last thirty years.
As such, Richard Crenna’s Colonel Trautman is an unsettling character in this film, who claims to have “made” Rambo and is ambiguously connected to some kind of shadow ops training school that turned Green Berets into the country’s most effective killing machines – a macho fantasy, sure, but a useful one in the story First Blood is actually telling. There’s a defined lack of clear moral straw men in First Blood, which I respond to. Rambo is by no means a good guy (for great portions of the film he’s more like the shark in Jaws), but he is a victim of circumstance. Brian Dennehy’s Sheriff Teasle isn’t a particularly dedicated villain, either; he makes some mistakes and is blisteringly overconfident, but past a certain point in the movie he really is just doing his job. And Trautman is neither a friend to Rambo nor an ally to Teasle but seems opportunistic towards both, concerned with saving lives as a numerical exercise more than out of any concern for right and wrong.
All of which, of course, makes the jump from First Blood to Rambo: First Blood Part II all the more startling: the gulf between the two films is so wide that all of America falls into it. From ambivalence and moral complexity we shift directly to an unabashed, text-forward repatriation of the entire Vietnam war by a berserkly effective American soldier so that this time, we can win. It’s astonishing, if unsurprising, and it says more about America’s broken-hearted relationship with its own pride than any of the “serious” Vietnam pictures of the era (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War) possibly could. As I said when reviewing Die Hard 4, if you want to take the pulse of America, look to her action movies. Rambo II may as well come with a mail-in manifesto and a pipe bomb.
Rambo II is also ugly as fuck. Where Ted Kotcheff lensed First Blood in wide, gorgeous Panavision frames that drank down the chilly hues of British Columbia in wintertime like a tall draught of ice water, moron sequel director George P. Cosmatos sticks a telephoto lens on his camera, snaps into constricted closeups of his main characters, and backs off the lighting contrast so that every frame looks like brown paste. It’s a masterclass in how completely differently two people can shoot what is ultimately the same content, and a film school would be well served by running compare-and-contrast workshops on Kotcheff and Cosmatos’ blocking decisions for all their second-year students.
But more than anything else, Rambo II (co-scripted by Tederick.com favourite James Cameron, making this perhaps the only thing he’s ever been involved with that I haven’t liked) single-handedly transforms John Rambo from a character of relative weight and dimension into an immediate, unabashed self-parody. I suspect this was an attempt at icon-making of the highest order, and arguably given Rambo’s stance in popular culture the attempt was successful. But every silly thing about Rambo in the second and third movies – his damped-down mullet; his bright-red headband lovingly wrapped around his face during “gear up” montages; his evident inability to wear, or even locate, a shirt – is so cartoonish that, taken in parallel with the similar development in the middle Rocky movies, they make one wonder what Stallone’s ideas around blockbuster filmmaking actually were: egomaniacal patriotism? Or outright contempt?
Trautman, too, becomes an amazingly weird beast in Rambo II and Rambo III, transforming from an untrustworthy government operative with a hidden agenda to the screen equivalent of an old college buddy and eventually, in Rambo III, an action sidekick. Honestly, it’s the latter incarnation that I think I like best of all of Crenna’s work in the franchise, although (given Crenna’s age in Rambo III) it’s also the part that hews furthest from credulity. But then, credulity is the first thing tossed out of the airplane in Rambo III, and it never comes back. The film – at the time, the most expensive movie ever made, at a gob-smacking $65 million – is an action movie phantasmagoria, the solar plexus of every single concept and cliché we’ve come to associate with action movies, and America generally, ever since. Rookie director Peter MacDonald fares better than his predecessor, because he actually knows where to place a camera. The back half of the film – where Rambo and Trautman face down the entire Russian army pretty much single-handedly – is a visual splendor of explosions, roaring Hind gunships, and (most memorably) a Rambo vs. Russian, tank vs. helicopter game of chicken. Which doesn’t even begin to explain the earlier game of dead goat.
It’s also worth mentioning that in the series’ continued, lame-duck attempts to grab political meaning out of what is ultimately little more than fascist propaganda, Rambo III sees Rambo, like James Bond the year prior, fighting alongside the future Al Qaeda. The film ends with a beautiful title card dedicating the film to the brave Mujahideen – who, in Rambo III’s estimation, are basically the Bedouin tribes from Lawrence of Arabia, but with rocket launchers. And yet in spite of all this, Rambo III is an amazingly dull movie, mostly because it appears to be trying to take Rambo seriously as a character, while supplying him with none of the character that made him interesting in the first place. It’s a roar and a snooze all at once, gutless and uncompelling, Hollywood filmmaking at both its glossy zenith and most malevolent soullessness.
All of which makes the Rambo saga’s footnote – the 2008 latter-day sequel, simply called Rambo – so much more enjoyable than a similarly-weighted, otherwise-unconnected action movie might have been. Really, Rambo is nothing noteworthy as an action movie, and its politics are as straightforward, brutal, and unthinking as the painful-looking musculature on 60-year-old Stallone. What makes the film so watchable is simply the return to focus of Rambo himself, in what is arguably the most direct and clear-headed portrayal of the character in the series thus far. In First Blood, Rambo is offscreen for great portions and lost in his PTSD for much of the rest; and in II and III, he’s a living Sergeant Slaughter action figure, inexplicably played by someone other than Sergeant Slaughter.
In Rambo, though, he’s Rambo. That’s all. He’s lived as some kind of boatman/snake wrangler in Thailand since the Afghanistan misadventure, though I’m compelled to wonder if there were any other Rambo missions in the meantime that never quite earned a feature film exploration. Nonetheless, Rambo is now stuck where he is, ferociously hostile to others, and pretty fucking bummed out – almost as though Rambo II and III had never happened, and he’s just the guy who was drifting through that town in First Blood, sad about the death of his last war buddy.
Life comes a’ knocking, though, and the resulting orgy of splinched human bodies going up like bloody piñatas is something to behold by any yardstick, even if it doesn’t add anything substantial to the Rambo mythology that we haven’t seen before. (I will say that Rambo’s jerry-rigging a claymore to a bomb and luring an entire team of soldiers and their dogs to it before blowing them and half the jungle sky-high ranks as my favourite kill in the whole series.) Regardless, it’s far and away Stallone’s best and most consistent performance in the series; this Rambo may be less credible a physical threat (though I still wouldn’t want to meet him… uh… ever), but he’s much more believable as the survivor of the events of the previous three movies. And he never takes off his shirt.
I don’t know if Rambo IV will end up being the last of the cycle or not, but it’s nonetheless profoundly interesting, and almost touching, to have watched Stallone close the loop on his two ‘80s icons when he was into his sixties. Rocky was always the poster boy for digging deeper and believing in yourself, the feel-good movie anthropomorphized in a sneer-mouthed boxer; but there is something wholly, threateningly absent at the centre of Rambo, which makes him an altogether more troubling screen persona. At his best, Rambo suggests dimensions of war and warmongering, and at his worst he’s the living embodiment of the empty shell at the center of American action movies, and American action, for half a century or more. God bless ‘im, I hope he lives to be a thousand.