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By rights, there should never have been a "First Blood Part II". The original script for "First Blood" had John Rambo committing suicide at the end of the film, but this was changed to allow him to live, not because the producers wanted to make a sequel but because test audiences found the original ending too depressing. Nevertheless, someone obviously thought that the character was too good to waste, because he ended up as the hero of two more films in the eighties, plus the recently released fourth instalment.
The official title of this film was "Rambo: First Blood Part II", but it is more commonly known simply as "Rambo". It starts with the title character in jail, where he is presumably expiating the crimes he committed in "First Blood", although this is never made too explicit. He is removed from prison by his former commanding officer, Colonel Trautman, for a secret mission. Rambo is to return to Vietnam to investigate reports that American POWs are still being held captive by the Communist regime. He is under strict instructions not to attempt to rescue any prisoners or to engage the enemy; his is to be simply a fact-finding mission.
What Rambo does not realise is that he is being set up, not by Trautman, who is portrayed as brave, honourable and incorruptible, but by the organiser of the mission, a military bureaucrat named Murdock. Murdock intends that the mission will prove that there are no American prisoners in Vietnam, partly because that will improve relationships between the American and Vietnamese governments, partly because it will make his own life easier. Unfortunately for Murdock, Rambo discovers that not only are Americans still being held prisoner, they are also being kept in hellish conditions. Of course, he is far too much of a hero to leave them to their fate, and tries to rescue them. The rest of the film is more or less one long battle between Rambo and a few allies (including a beautiful Vietnamese girl) and the evil commie soldiers and their Russian allies. Most of the evil commies, of course, end up dead, although I was surprised to learn from your "trivia" section that the total death toll was as low as 67. At times it seemed as though Rambo was trying to wipe out the entire Vietnamese army.
The tone of this film is very different from the first. In "First Blood" Rambo was unquestionably a criminal, even though his responsibility for his crimes was lessened by severe provocation and by his mental instability. In "Rambo" he is a bona fide all-American hero. A few years earlier the director, George Pan Cosmatos, had made "The Cassandra Crossing", a biased piece of left-wing anti-American propaganda. Cosmatos, however, was nothing if not versatile, and "Rambo" proves that he could also turn his hand to biased right-wing pro-American propaganda. The one thing the two films have in common is that both are laughably bad.
"First Blood" had its faults, but it also had its virtues. Its stance, that the anti-war movement was partly to blame for the problems faced by Vietnam vets in readjusting to civilian life, was a controversial one, but at least the film was trying to make a statement about war, social attitudes to war, and the roots of violence in society. "Rambo", by contrast, has very few virtues, except that the action sequences are well enough done to please those who like that sort of thing. It is essentially a sort of jingoistic revenge fantasy for those Americans who were still sore about the Vietnam war. Rambo re-fights the war single-handed, and this time the right side wins. Take that, Charlie Cong!
By this point, no doubt, the film's admirers (and there seem to be plenty- more than 2,000 voters have already given it ten stars) will have concluded that I am a liberal commie-loving pinko. Far from it- in fact, I have always despised Communism as a pernicious ideology. What I dislike about the film is not its politics but its lack of subtlety and its suggestion that the solution to all problems, including ideological disputes, is to go in with all guns blazing and to try and kill as many people as possible. It makes no attempt to understand the political complexities of South-East Asia or why not everyone in the region was pro-American. For all its anti-Communism, the film is the sort of moronic sledgehammer propaganda that the Communists were very good at churning out themselves- except that they attributed all the world's problems to Capitalism, or Imperialism, or Revisionism, or whatever other ism they had taken a dislike to. Compared to "Rambo", "The Green Berets" was a masterly piece of political analysis. 3/10


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