Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

All right let's get into it. Rambo: First Blood Part II. After the one-man war of the first movie, Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) has been spending time in jail. His old superior Colonel Troutman (Richard Crenna) busts him out for a special rescue mission in Vietnam, hoping he can use his crazy skills to find a camp of POW's who were captured during the war. According to Marshall Murdock (Charles Napier), who's in charge of the operation, he is only supposed to take photographs, and in no way engage the enemy. The whole point of the mission is to appease naysayers at home who are still fussing about that whole Vietnam War-thing. Of course Rambo does not heed these orders and decides to try to free the prisoners after meeting up with his Vietnamese contact Co Bao (Julia Nickson-Soul). Now it's one man and one woman versus both the Vietnamese and Russian military, with no help from Murdock and his men (despite Troutman's efforts). There's lots of torture, explosions, and of course, brutal killing.

I was surprised by the first Rambo, in its legitimate attempt to question how a traumatized soldier might cope after coming back from the Vietnam War with nothing real to cling to after his horrendous experiences. It was an interesting story, while still being very action-packed and thrilling. With the sequel they took it to the next level action-wise, but sort of forgot about having a story. Usually that's not a big deal for this kind of film, but I guess I was set up by the first movie to expect something more. I didn't really understand who anyone was here, aside from Rambo = Good Guy, Vietnamese and Russian soldiers = Bad Guys, and Charles Napier = Asshole. It seems the filmmakers just took the easy way out. Again, not a big deal for your standard action fare, but it was frustrating in this instance.

Ok the main real thing that bothers me about this movie is the goddamn "love" angle they tried to throw in. The second a female character was introduced I was like hmm... she is probably just there to help him out since there's really no time for any serious relationship to form here and also Rambo is hell of traumatized and in many ways like a child and should not be dealing with these kinds of emotions in his current state. But of course like two thirds of the way in they're suddenly kissing and then he has to do a whole revenge thing. Buh. Angry!

Anyway it's still a decent gun-shooting, knife-wielding, things-exploding kind of movie, but not especially impressive. I'll still be seeing the other Rambo's, to be sure, and now that I have more of an idea of what to expect, I'll probably enjoy them more. I hear Rambo IV has like 1 kill per second on average, or something crazy like that. Which is seriously rad.

3/5