Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)
Rambo: First Blood Part II is one of those films that doesn’t really have much going for it these days save for the social significance for the time in which it was released, where it tapped a nerve with American audiences who gobbled the revisionist rhetoric up and clamored for more. Despite the R rating, the film would dominate the box office in its first month of release and linger in the top 10 another two, racking up a whopping $150 million in the United States and another $150 from world markets, becoming the second-highest box office performer of the year, a blockbuster year for its star, Stallone, with Rocky IV coming in third place. It would also make even more money in promotional tie-ins, from trading cards to toys to games to posters and other merchandise, which was odd given that the film was not intended for kids.
In and of itself, it’s not a film that should have been a blockbuster, but it tapped into the zeitgeist of the Reagan era and its disdain for government bureaucracy and its pride in the military, including the feeling that American soldiers should be honored and respected, regardless of the war they fought in. Vietnam, America’s freshest and deepest wound, might seem to heal a bit with the tagline “This time, we win,” a proposition that had a lot of merit to the troubled public who wanted retribution for the lives lost, and the government that sent them there. The public wanted to root on the disgraced veteran, and they would get to do so in the theaters with Rambo as the spokesperson to bring back the respect they lost ten years before.
The story follows First Blood, where John Rambo is in prison for his one-man army heroics against law enforcement in the first film. Here, Colonel Trautman (Crenna) approaches Rambo to undergo a covert operation that will presumably save the lives of thousands of POWs still in Southeast Asia, if he can find evidence that they are still being held captive. Rambo is hired only to take pictures, but that doesn’t sit well with the disgruntled vet, who uses the opportunity to get them out while he can. However, corrupt government officials don’t want Rambo to find any POWs, as this would complicate American relations in the area, and when irrefutable evidence is given, the mission is aborted, leaving Rambo all by himself — one man against an army of sadistic Vietnamese and Soviet military advisors, merging America’s former fight with the Cold War enemy of today..
The success of 1982’s First Blood would encourage its rights holder at Carolco, Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar, to get to commissioning on a follow-up shortly after. After Kevin Jarre took a stab at the first story script, it was handed over to James Cameron, who proceeded to write the story with the original title of First Blood II: The Mission. Cameron who would follow in the footsteps of “First Blood” author David Morrell and First Blood director Ted Kotcheff by being from Canada, despite Rambo’s all-American profile. He was suggested to script by David Giler, who helped with the story development and who had also contributed to revisions for First Blood.
Giler was impressed with Cameron based on the strength of his script for The Terminator, and he worked on the scripts for First Blood II and Aliens (co-produced by Giler) as he waited for several months for Arnold Schwarzenegger to complete Conan the Destroyer in order to appear in The Terminator. Cameron had much more emphasis on making it a pure action vehicle, with more dialogue and character touches, including an idea to give Rambo a comic relief tech-savvy sidekick on his adventure, a role which Vajna and Kassar initially thought John Travolta could fill.
As with the first entry, Stallone would insist on heavily revising the script himself, with only the basic plot and action sequences being retained from Cameron’s original. The novelization would also experience its own form of extensive rewrites. In his contract, the only person allowed to write a novel about Rambo was David Morrell. He initially declined, as the character had become so different from his original novel, especially given that he dies at the end of the book. However, Carolco strongly wanted all marketing tie-ins to hep to promote the film, granting Morrell his request to have much more latitude to change things from the finished film, allowing him to use James Cameron’s original screenplay as well as lots of backstories invented for the novel by Morrell himself.
After Stallone decided to overhaul Cameron’s work, he nixed the buddy movie element, thinking it should only be a solo adventure, injected more politics into the motivation of the main characters, and removed nearly all of the attempts at character development, including backstories given to the POWs. He also changed the title to Rambo: First Blood Part II, thinking that the series should be named after the main character to align with his other big series, Rocky.
Despite bring on board for the novelizations for the second and third Rambo films, Morrell would end up suing the producers for the share of the profits of both films he felt he was contractually owed, claiming that they underrepresented the net take and did not include the millions they made in Rambo-related merchandising deals.
Stallone knew that he’d have to be in the best shape of his life for the role, undergoing physical conditioning for up to four hours a day for the prior eight months leading up to the shoot, including archery instruction and practiced survival skills.
Filming would be done in Mexico, primarily around the Acapulco area, initially reported that Stallone said he couldn’t deal with the amount and types of insects that exist in the jungles of Thailand, where Vietnam war movies are often shot, though Vajna said it was more a financial decision. Stallone still did complain about a large number of snakes and scorpions they had to be wary of during the jungle scenes. The shoot was no picnic, with sweltering humidity and days that encroached well into the triple digits in temperature, draining much of the energy from the crew as it progressed. They also were deluged by one of the largest storms in years, Hurricane Odile, washing out many of the roads along the way (requiring helicopters to get crew and equipment in and out), though the resulting mud was put to good use as camouflage for Rambo in one of its most famous action sequences. One final tragedy would occur when one of the special effects consultants, Cliff Wenger Jr., died from an explosive that went off prematurely; the film is dedicated to Wenger.
It would be a much larger undertaking than the first effort, with a $21 million budget and the use of about 3,000 extras. It was a chore to find many Asian actors and extras to put into the film, but one way they found was to contact employees working in Chinese restaurants in the area.
Despite its pro-Vietnam vet stance, some veterans would come out to protest the film for its glamorization of the war and of pornographic levels of violence in general. They also felt that shifting the spokesperson role from real-life survivors of the war to a cartoonish fictional he-man was hurting the cause and confusing the public as to the real issues they continue to face. Russian-Americans also would come out against the film stating that it adds fuel to the false stereotype that Russians are evil and their tactics are sadistic and inhumane, especially as portrayed by British actor Stephen Berkhoff (who also played a similar Russian baddie in Octopussy two years prior). Berkhoff filled in for the originally cast Dolph Lundgren, whose contract was paid off here so he could be the big bad in Rocky IV. Vietnamese-Americans did the same, claiming they are routinely demonized in American action films like this, and its negative portrayals would also cause the film to be banned in places like the Soviet Union (naturally) and part of Asia, including India.
Clearly, the film is meant as catharsis for the not-yet-healed psyche of a country torn apart by the war effort in Vietnam. “Do we get to win this time?”, says John Rambo, when asked to take on the mission to do recon for remaining POWs kept in Vietnamese captivity. This sets the table for the rest of the film, in which Rambo proceeds to eliminate the Vietnamese baddies for the sake of his brothers-in-arms, while also taking on the military bureaucrat in the form of Marshall Murdock to give one more “F.U.” to those who sent young men to die without a proper strategy. Rambo is a force of nature, removing many of the clothes he wears, coating himself in mud and hiding in plain sight in the trees like an oiled-up Tarzan, unlike Murdock, who only sits at a desk in a shirt and tie, drinking Cokes and complaining about the heat.
In Rambo’s world, the American soldiers are the true victims of the war, and the unholy hell that he unleashes upon those who did harm to them is gratified and justified by the bodies left behind. Notable in the shift here is the fact that in the first Rocky and in First Blood, the heroes do not win in the end, but become the heroes because of the odds. In subsequent films, their quest is to win, to be the best, setting up bigger and badder enemies to take down completely on their own. When we first met Rambo, he was an empty shell of somber melancholy, and now he’s a powderkeg of anger just waiting for his chance to unleash at any and all whoever wronged him.
Despite its box office success, the film was met with poor critical reception, though Siskel & Ebert gave it two thumbs up purely as an exciting action movie, despite recognizing it has plenty of flaws. It would go on to receive the Golden Raspberry Award (aka, the Razzie) for Worst Picture of 1985, and Stallone would get Worst Actor and Worst Screenplay. Stallone himself would go on to state that it is his least favorite in the series, claiming it is too cartoonish.
Removing political importance aside, Rambo: First Blood Part II is a mediocre film at best, poorly developed, with anemic, slogan-pushing dialogue by screenwriter Stallone. The direction by Italian helmer Cosmatos, who was recommended to Stallone by someone close to him that saw and enjoyed Cosmatos’ 1983 film Unknown Origin, is serviceable at best, and the dispatching of the villains borders on the level of high camp. Reportedly, Stallone actually directed the film in everything but name, handing Cosmatos a daily list of things he wanted to be done so he could concentrate more on working out and training between scenes. This would be the same arrangement that Cosmatos would have with Kurt Russell for Tombstone in 1993.
Wrong turns are taken at nearly every step, with an awkward romance coming into play in the strangest of environments. The enemies that Rambo faces are nameless fodder for his wrath, while the POWs have no distinction — just a huddled mass there for Rambo to protect and to give him a thumbs up when he saves their bacon from the fire.
John Rambo was a man tired of death and killing in First Blood, in which only one person dies (and it was accidental); the decidedly pro-war Rambo II has its main character going on a blood-thirsty rampage of revenge, laying to waste over 70 targets in some of the most vicious of ways possible — more than the reported 59 kills Rambo delivers in the entire Vietnam War. It did get the attention of renown anti-Communist American President Ronald Reagan, who loved it, proclaiming, “Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.”
Though tagged by a cop as a “dirty hippie” in his first outing, Reagan would proclaim Rambo as a definite Republican by round two. Redemption for Vietnam soldiers was a radical shift through the 1980s, erecting the Vietnam War Memorial in the year of First Blood in 1982, and plenty of movies about saving those “missing in action” or exacting retribution for all American foes the right way with the one-man-army representation of the American that can’t be bested physically or mentally in the theater of war.
Action junkies may rejoice at seeing mindless carnage on display without heavy plotting or thinking ruining the tempo, but it sure would be nice to have had a script accompanying it that contained more than five pages of dialogue. So long as you’re just wanting pure action on a fundamental level and are either prone to enjoying or immune to laughing at the most glaringly jingoistic of dialogue, it makes for a relatively entertaining bad movie.
Rambo II features the famous shot of Rambo tying his headband on and preparing for battle. I’m guessing the rest of the crew tied one on as well, as big-budget filmmaking this dunderheaded could only come as a result of a lack of blood to the brain.
Qwipster’s rating: C-
MPAA Rated: R for violence, some sexuality, and language
Running Time: 94 min.
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff, Julia Nickson, Martin Kove, George Cheung, Andy Wood, William Ghent, Voyo Goric
Director: George P. Cosmatos
Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone, James Cameron