Rambo (v.):
1. To go all out in some unreasonable, life-threatening effort to kill many people while screaming a fierce battle cry
2. To infiltrate a heavily-guarded area with complete stealth, taking down many enemies on the way—Urban Dictionary
Popular culture at large knows the character of John Rambo as a caricature of masculinity who solves every problem with a seemingly endless supply of bullets and explosives. But what most people don’t know is that the character didn’t start out that way. Remember, the series began with First Blood in 1982, so it wasn’t made with quite as much of the wild excesses that we associate with the ’80s (as Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III were).
Here’s the difference: Call someone “Rambo” based on the latter two movies, and you’re implying that he’s the kind of guy who would weed his garden with a flamethrower. Call someone “Rambo” based on First Blood, and you’re implying that he’s a barrel of PTSD-flavored psychosis, waiting for the slightest chance to wage self-destructive guerilla warfare on everyone around him at the slightest provocation. It’s a subtle distinction.
When we first meet John Rambo (do I even need to say who plays him?), he’s just going to meet the last of his Special Forces unit from Vietnam. Alas, Rambo’s old comrade died of cancer the summer before, due to chronic Agent Orange poisoning. Temporarily left without a purpose, Rambo wanders around and comes up close to the small town of Hope, somewhere in Washington state.
Rambo promptly comes across an overzealous sheriff (Will Teasle, played by Brian Dennehy), who arrests Rambo on charges of vagrancy. Rambo suffers further mistreatment at the hands of more corrupt and vindictive cops in Hope, triggering flashbacks to Rambo’s imprisonment and torture in Vietnam. Rambo proceeds to go apeshit on the police officers, who chase him into the woods of the Pacific Northwest (yes, the film was actually shot in British Columbia, but that’s still the Pacific Northwest). The police respond to Rambo with excessive force, Rambo responds by way of extreme violence, and the whole thing escalates to a full-blown war.
To recap: On one side is Sheriff Will Teasle, an asshole who’s ready to die for the sake of his own massive ego and take a whole town’s worth of cops with him. On the other side is John Rambo, a man who causes massive amounts of mayhem because that’s the only thing he knows how to do and he’s got nothing left to live for.
There are no good guys in this movie.
Of course, that’s not to say that the characters are completely unsympathetic. Rambo, after all, is a man who gave everything for his country. Even more than that, he’s a man who was remade in his country’s image. A man who turned himself into nothing more or less than the ultimate killing machine so that America might find victory and security in Vietnam. So then he comes home, rejected by the very people he fought for. Even worse, he’s attacked by another group who swore to protect and to serve the American people, despite the fact that he did absolutely nothing wrong. So he did what he was trained to do and fought back.
Conversely, there’s Teasle. He claims that Rambo is a clear and present threat, he claims that Rambo is guilty of resisting arrest, and he’s not wrong on either count. As far as he’s concerned, he’s simply protecting his town and asserting his authority, both of which are well within his prerogative. The problem is that he isn’t out for justice, he’s out for revenge. He’s acting entirely out of a bruised ego, which pushes him to obsession as he takes on a force he can neither understand nor defeat.
This leads me to address one of my biggest problems with the movie: Its ending. In the original David Morrell novel, Rambo and Teasle both end up dead. This is how it should have been, and the movie suffers for sparing them. Rambo is a very tragic character, and denying him a tragic death leaves his character arc incomplete. As for Teasle, he deserves some kind of comeuppance for his catastrophic level of incompetence. Moreover, if these two men were so eager to die for the sake of their vendetta, they should’ve gone ahead and killed each other. The point of the movie is lost otherwise.
Come to think of it, the whole movie is surprisingly bloodless. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people get injured and there’s a lot of property destroyed. But in terms of people getting killed onscreen, there’s really only one casualty. Granted, he was killed in a rather implausible manner after Rambo cheats death in a laughable fashion and performs a feat of superhuman strength.
Another one of the film’s flaws is in its editing. There are plenty of scenes — particularly in the second act — where the film cuts between sequences in a way that’s very disruptive. Perhaps more importantly, plenty of action scenes in this film are edited in a very sloppy manner. The car chases and explosions were filled with so many cutaways that it was plainly obvious something was going on behind the scenes.
That said, the action scenes in this movie still work, and they work for a very simple reason: Sylvester Stallone. It’s not exactly news to say that Stallone makes Rambo into a thoroughly convincing badass, but he also does a surprisingly good job at playing smart. Rambo isn’t just a guy who shoots everything in sight, he’s a tactical genius as well. He succeeds by out-thinking his opponents, though in this case, I’ll admit that doing so is no Herculean feat.
Far more impressively, Stallone makes Rambo appear stealthy. Yes, I’m still talking about Rambo. Being stealthy. This fucking giant of a man slinking around in the shadows undetected. If you have a hard time believing that, you obviously haven’t seen the film.
So yeah, Stallone does a fantastic job of making Rambo work as a character. However, that’s probably in part because Rambo doesn’t have that many lines. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that Rambo’s huge closing monologue looked phenomenal on paper, but Stallone’s delivery of it borders on unintentional hilarity.
Speaking of which, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention all the one-dimensional characters. Brian Dennehy does a surprisingly good job of bringing some nuance to Teasle, but too many cops under his command are impossibly vindictive. Deputy Sgt. Galt (Jack Starrett), the film’s sole casualty, comes immediately to mind. The film also features a one-dimensional “good cop,” played by none other than a young David Caruso. He only gets maimed.
All told, First Blood isn’t a perfect film and it’s dated a bit in the past few decades, but it’s still a damn good movie. Even if some steps were taken to sugar-coat the material (changing the ending was a particularly egregious move), I’m still very impressed that such a popcorn action film went to so many dark places. In spite of Stallone’s terrible line delivery, the movie still does a superlative job at depicting the plight of this war hero who got medals from Congress and derision from civilians.
On that note, have a happy Memorial Day. Remember those men and women who fought for the sake of your country, particularly those who lost their lives and/or their sanity in the process. They are to be thanked and respected, and not just because they could royally fuck your shit up.