40 years ago: ‘Rambo: First Blood Part II’ was a sequel for the Reagan era

Sylvester Stallone brought back Rambo as the killing machine you probably most remember.

Sylvester Stallone played the character of John Rambo in five different movies, released between 1982 and 2019. But the “Rambo” that exists in the popular imagination, I’m convinced — the muscular guy running through the jungle, brandishing a machine gun and mowing down communists — is sourced almost entirely to the second film, 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II.

The original First Blood may have come out in 1982, but it very much had the soul of a 1970s movie. Directed by Ted Kotcheff, who passed away earlier this spring, First Blood was based on a 1972 novel that Hollywood spent most of that decade trying to adapt, about a struggling Vietnam veteran returning home and going toe-to-toe with the local police.

But the second Rambo film, Rambo: First Blood Part II, is Reagan-era all the way. Released 40 years ago next week, it’s got a huge reactionary streak, although it doesn’t quite go all the way with it: After all, the film’s ultimate villains are corrupt American military officials:

The differences in Stallone’s Rocky movies are similar- the original Rocky in 1976 was very much a product of the New Hollywood era, while Rocky III and IV are much more muscular, both thematically and in terms of Stallone’s physique, and Reagan-like. Rocky IV, also from 1985, has Rocky Balboa all but single-handedly defeating communism.

The 1985 Rambo was directed by George P. Cosmatos, who would go on to direct Tombstone, and Stallone co-wrote the film with… James Cameron, of all people. The script gets right to the point, setting up the premise in the first five minutes, and the running time is just over 90 minutes.

Let out of prison with the promise of a pardon for the numerous crimes he committed in the first movie, Rambo’s mission is to return to Vietnam and obtain photographic evidence that Vietnam was still holding living American POWs in the mid-1980s (those POW-MIA flags notwithstanding, they almost certainly were not, and that movement was pushed by some seriously bad actors at the the time.) It’s not part of Rambo’s mandate to kick their asses, but kick asses he does, for the majority of the running time.

Released a decade after the last choppers departed Saigon, it’s a revenge fantasy about a Vietnam vet going back and refighting the war. “Do we get to win this time?” he says. Spike Lee’s Da Five Bloods, a fantastic film unjustly forgotten due to its mid-pandemic release, was a fine revisionist take on Rambo and other movies like it.