Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985)

 

The first film concerning John Rambo is still a surprisingly low-key and fairly dramatic affair. This one is the one where they went not only over the top, but over the hills and far away. This is also the prime one that people think about whenever they think about Rambo: an oiled-up badass, impervious to bullets and the bane of the communist menace the world around. 

Of course it is still oodles of fun, but there's no denying this is as "USA! USA!" as action films in the 80s got, so it's best to be ready for a hefty dose of cheese.

After the events of the first film, John Rambo was sentenced to hard labour, which is where Colonel Trautman finds him. Trautman offers Rambo a deal: stay in prison, or go for one more mission back in Vietnam, finding prisoners of war still held there. Of course, Rambo accepts, or this would have been the shortest film ever. 

Naturally, it doesn't take long for Rambo and Trautman to have to deal with shady government officials that don't quite grasp the nature of the Vietnam War, but what the heck. Rambo is ordered to go in and simply take pictures, but when he discovers that there are actually still people being held prisoner, he breaks one out. Then things get ugly when the evacuation helicopter is ordered to leave him stranded.

This doesn't sit well with our hero, no sirree. But as he's now captured in a Vietnamese camp, he's sort of stuck. And then the sadistic Russian commander arrives. Rambo is tortured some more and when he escapes, he is hellbent on payback: on the Vietnamese troopers, the Russian commander and of course the penpusher that sold him out. 

Cue lots of things that go boom.

Is it silly? You betcha. 

Is it entertaining beyond belief? Of course.

Naturally you need to ignore the dialogue, which upped the cheese factor to the Nth degree. Heck, the patriotic mumbo jumbo that is being spewed is enough to make any regular person a little queasy, but this is just the right amount of cringe to become hilarious. Heck, they try to recapture the feeling of the emotional speech at the end of the first one and fail the mark horribly. 

But what you do get, is an oiled up, roided to the gills Stallone making faces, screaming loudly and blowing shit up, usually with a bow and arrow and wielding an M-60 machine gun with only one arm. What's not to like for the testosterone driven preteen? 

For the record: it's pretty bloody hard to wield and M-60 with only one arm. That shit's heavy, y'all. 

And of course you need to be able to stomach the "America is great!" and "All Russians are evil!" tropes that were so prevalent during the 80s. That being said: if you needed a creepy evil Russian, you could do a lot worse than Steven Berkoff, who will always be the perfect actor to play an evildoer that does evil deeds. 

It's about as deep as a papercut but this is so quintessentially of the era, it's almost endearing. If you can ignore the horrendous subtext, this is still one heck of an action film that delivers on the boom and then some.