\n<\/p>\n
The first Rambo<\/a> movie,\u00a0First Blood<\/em>, is a survival thriller crossed with a bleak\u00a0character study about a psychologically\u00a0scarred Vietnam War veteran (Sylvester Stallone<\/a>) who is abused by a small-town sheriff and\u00a0suffers a mental breakdown. Their conflict to a tense standoff between the two men\u00a0in the woods\u00a0of the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n The second Rambo movie,\u00a0Rambo: First Blood – Part II<\/em>,\u00a0is a bombastic and ludicrous action movie about the same man \u2014 now\u00a0magically cured of all his trauma and mental baggage \u2014 returning to Vietnam to rescue forgotten American POWs.<\/p>\n The Rambo<\/em> sequels only got more absurd from there. In the third film, Rambo helps the\u00a0Mujahideen fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan. In the fourth, he slaughters Burmese soldiers as part of a mission\u00a0to rescue kidnapped American missionaries. In the fifth and easily the worst in the series,\u00a0he returns to America and single-handedly dismantles a drug cartel\u2019s human trafficking ring by turning his ranch into a\u00a0Home Alone-<\/em>style death trap.<\/p>\n These sequels may occasionally be good for a few vicarious thrills, but they are a long ways from where the character and the franchise started. And in a new interview with\u00a0Lulu Garcia-Navarro of\u00a0The New York Times<\/a><\/em>, Stallone blamed himself for the character\u2019s turn into what he called \u201ckind of like a cartoon.\u201d<\/p>\n When\u00a0Garcia-Navarro compared the Rambo of the later films to an \u201cavatar\u201d of a classic action hero with \u201ca little less depth than the original character” Stallone fully agreed. As he put it…<\/p>\n Absolutely right \u2014 and that\u2019s my fault. This is where this kind of vainglorious pomposity … like \u2018If you like that<\/em>, wait until you see this<\/em>!\u2019 And I didn\u2019t really focus on the depth of what he was still going through while trying to save POWs. He\u2019s trying to save his own soul. We never got into that. It\u2019s just bravado, bravado, bravado, bulletproof. And that\u2019s all me. That\u2019s all me.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n