'Rambo' - C or D?

http://www.therobotspajamas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Rambo-Animated.gif

Interesting retrospecive on the original trilogy (on the occasion of the new 4K blu-rays):

https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2019/01/first-blood-rambo-first-blood-part-ii-rambo-iii-4k.html

Really good write-up although this:

Yet I'd be lying if I said Rambo's isolation didn't resonate with me now, as I stew in the sads of middle age, unmarried and broke, with an inapplicable film degree (like Rambo's tank training) and a hollow husk of a social life. Adult men are so bad at maintaining friendships without the glue of a social institution keeping them together--just ask the MEL Magazine article "Why Are Adult Men So Bad At Maintaining Friendships?."

Felt a bit off. Its quite startling for a guy of almost no words or any kind of emotional life whose life has been devastated by conflict and loss to track and seek out his old buddy - and as he mentions later he did look up Trautman too.

Disappointed by no mention of Rambo V: Last Blood (and yes, that's seriously happening).

rambo 6: transfusion has a shot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vWg5yJuWfs

I don't even see why this is a Rambo film. Looks like Sly vs ... Mexican drug cartel? So basically a full-on Death Wish right-wing fantasy in a way that the even the other sequels never quite were.

rambo cos the name will draw the boomers.

right-wing fantasy in a way that the even the other sequels never quite were

Rambo III is the only one I've seen, which was the most demented right-wing fantasy movie I'd encountered before or in 31 years since, so yeesh @ this assessment

Being a Rambo vs the cartels film makes almost too much sense for this franchise at this moment in time.

From memory, Rambo III was ... him fighting the Russians with Afghan allies? At the very least that conflict was complicated. But lone white badass going down to Mexico to fight the cartels? I dunno.

rambo helps proto-al qaeda good guys against evil soviets is complicated?

The first two sequels fetishize extra-legal (but hush-hush state sanctioned!) vigilante violence, but they're more about Rambo being called in/exploited to clean up US military messes. The third sequel, it's still a (humanitarian, iirc) mess to be cleaned up, iirc, but it lacks the government's go-ahead. This one seems full vigilante.

'afghan allies'

the original First Blood is solid right wing pulp.

What makes the first one right wing?

(Disclaimer: I only saw the third one one time on cable when I was a kid)

Like, I understand that these movies are all violent kill festd and therefore fascist, which id to say conservative, but they are not all the same in my memory.

first blood pushes the "veterans were spat on when they came back" narrative which is inherently conservative and militaristic.

I want, what they want, and every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had, wants! For our country to love us as much as we love it! That's what I want

(oh yeah that's the second one oops)

NOTHING IS OVER! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn't let us win! And I come back to the world, and I see all those maggots at the airport, protestin' me, spittin', callin' me "Baby Killer!", and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me, huh?! Who are they, unless they been me and been there, and know what the Hell they're yellin' about?!

forgot that he specifically mentioned the "stabbed in the back" narrative of the vietnam war

The first one's politics are bat shit. Yes, the Veterans were Spit On, but the police chief (Brian Dennehy!) treats Rambo like a hippie, so the director Ted Kotcheff has it both ways.

the boogeyman will usually change and so do the tactics this brave man has to resort to but the reactionary shit remains the same.

The first Rambo has really weird muddled both-ways politics, yeah, but the story of a vet with PTSD more or less let down/ignored by his country isn't really right wing, per se. The second one is definitely a warmonger fantasy, but Vietnam was of course prosecuted by both political parties (as have been countless military actions before and since then); the "finish the job" narrative seems to skew right, but iirc he was lured there to rescue POWs (and taken advantage of and fucked over by the US government in the process) . With the third one, by "complicated" I mean it's not as if the Russians were the good guys in Afghanistan; it was a big multi-national fuck-up of proxies and others. (I forget why they called in Rambo). In the fourth one it was ... a mercenary job? To rescue missionaries? I don't remember, but I don't remember it having anything to do with the US military. This new one, though, is fully straight-from-the-headlines conservative boilerplate. "Rambo travels to Mexico to save a friend's daughter who has been kidnapped by the Mexican cartel." So you've got Mexico, cartels, maybe sex trafficking, etc., and the lone wolf gun-toting white male hero fantasy crossing the border to do what (clearly) law enforcement cannot do. Because no doubt hands are tied, or whatever. Maybe when he gets her back he'll start building a wall.

Again, not saying any of these films are subversive progressive polemics or anything, but there is some (small) degree of nuance differentiating them, and I'm not sure I'd call the previous films reactionary, at least not in the way Death Wish or Dirty Harry are reactionary.

Some interesting stuff in here:

https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/rambo-movies-politics-sylvester-stallone-franchise

Re: Rambo IV:

Juxtaposing the jauntily optimistic ending of Rambo III (Rambo and Trautman drive off together, joking that they're going soft, as the film closes with a dedication to "the gallant people of Afghanistan") with the character's cynical speech to missionary Sarah Miller (found in the longer, more character-driven extended edition of the movie) about the universal character of war -- "Old men start it, young men fight it, no one wins, everybody in the middle dies, and nobody tells the truth." -- it's reasonable to infer that subsequent, uh, developments in Afghanistan and the light they shed on the wisdom of American intervention abroad led Rambo to simply end his tortured relationship with his country altogether. Who'd have expected John Freaking Rambo, of all characters, to reach this conclusion when the film was released, at the tail end of the George W. Bush administration, before Obama was elected, and when our still-ongoing war on terror was a mere 6-and-a-half years old?

I just watched Rambo 3 for the first time a couple weeks ago and complicated is not a word I would place in the same universe as it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eliQEStzhu4

Interested to check out that thrillist piece tho. I saw Rambo IV in the theater but all I remember was a part where he shot a guy with a giant machine gun and the guy basically disintegrated, dont even remember what continent it took place on

xpost I didn't mean the movie was complicated, just the Afghanistan scenario.

I don't believe in guilty pleasures but I make an exception for the Rambo movies - bar First Blood, easily the best and least problematic entry in the series; contra his first post, Soto's follow-up implies (correctly) that it's not politically coherent/consistent enough to qualify as "right wing pulp." The rest are progressively uglier "do we get to win this time?" fantasies. I'm not proud of myself for liking them, even if "Rambo: First Blood Part II" is some kind of camp classic. But I do. God help me, I'm even looking forward to the new one.

can't believe they didnt call this one Tired Blood

looking fwd to Armond's rave

They should just call it "Blood."

"Blood Transfusion"

“Rocky Blood”

Wise Blood's already taken.

wow so last blood is absolutely fucking vile, huh

The first one's politics are bat shit. Yes, the Veterans were Spit On, but the police chief (Brian Dennehy!) treats Rambo like a hippie, so the director Ted Kotcheff has it both ways.

― recriminations from the nitpicking woke (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 30 May 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Batshit and hilarious. If I catch it on TV I always watch it.

First Blood is great. Haven't seen the others and haven't felt a compulsion to.

This, on the other hand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo:_The_Force_of_Freedom

first blood is great

iii is incredible in its entirely unique mix of greased-muscle homoerotica and full-throated support for the brave fighters of the mujahideen

last blood is a sickening display of anti-mexican torture porn which ends with a gang of drug lords being murdered in rambo’s backyard viet cong-style network of boobytrapped underground tunnels

What I love about it is how a product of the US military completely completely goes off on civilians and police.

Similar to Mr.X's monologue in JFK. The same network trained to commit imperialist war crimes in country after country turning in on itself.

murdered AND mutilated i should have said in that last entry

Was rewatching the first Rambo, which I've always liked fine, but I could never figure out why the cops in this small town don't like him so much. What is their problem?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, September 1, 2016 12:14 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

acab

long hair

First Blood is a masterpiece

anti cop
anti military

watched the first three this week because i was sick and ii is directed by my dude george p cosmatos so i figured, why not? i fully fell in love first blood, it's a reverse horror movie that takes place largely in a forest wreathed in fog, and it's so mournful and sad. low body count weighs weird considering what comes after, iirc only a few dogs and a cop die, and the cop's death is an accident out of self-defense. small town sheriff's department on a power trip seems completely aligned with reality to me, even if the actual politics animating it are way more opaque

first blood part ii is such wild fascist wish fulfillment that i just imagine he hallucinates this entire film during his breakdown in the first film. it fuckin rules though. exploding arrows and a fuckin helicopter chase... cinema

iirc Rambo kills a helicopter with a rock

iirc only one person dies in the first Rambo!

the scene in ii where sly grabs the microphone and says "murdock... i'm coming to get you" has to be one of the greatest sequences in action movie history