I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for First Blood.  You know, before Sylvester Stallone turned Rambo into an All-American symbol of the 80’s.  Before he joined up with the Taliban to fight the Russians.  Before he singlehandedly blew up half of Burma.  Before all of that, there was just First Blood; a simple, brutally efficient action flick.  As much as I love the cartoonish violence of 2 and the sheer carnage of 4, from a straight-up story standpoint, this one is the best.

We all know what happens.  Rambo goes into a small hick town looking for a cheeseburger and gets hassled by The Man (Brian Dennehy).  He arrests Rambo and his men try to rough him up.  Rambo has Nam flashbacks like crazy, snaps, and escapes into the woods.  Dennehy and his men give chase but Rambo is a trained killer and sneaks up on Dennehy and holds him at knifepoint and tells him to back off.  He doesn’t and pretty soon, not only is the Hick Patrol after Rambo, but also the state police AND the National Guard.  For Rambo, there’s only one alternative:  Turn the town into his own private war zone.

As great as the scenes where Rambo grabs his M-60 and fires a thousand rounds into office buildings, blows up gas stations and used car lots, and other assorted mayhem are, the scenes of Dennehy slowly needling him are just as good.  Once we’ve established that Dennehy and his men are the scum of the Earth and deserve what they get (except for David Caruso, he was generally decent to Rambo), when Rambo finally goes apeshit, the audience is behind him 100%. 

Although Rambo was not quite the indestructible symbol of Americana that he’d later become, I still like the fact that in this movie, he jumps off a mountain and it doesn’t faze him, he gets shot and it doesn’t faze him and he gets hit by a bazooka and it doesn’t faze him. 

The center of the movie is not the bullets and the action though; it’s the relationship between Rambo and his superior, Trautman (Richard Crenna).  Though Trautman is mostly there for exposition purposes and to talk up just how much of a badass Rambo is (“Don’t forget a good supply of body bags!”), the final moments of the film where Trautman tries to talk some sense into him are expertly handled by director Ted (Weekend at Bernie’s) Kotcheff.  Stallone does some of the best acting of his career in this scene.  I was especially impressed with his ability to effectively emote even when you can only make out every seventh word he’s saying.  That’s talent. 

Yeah, I know you can point out the obvious Vietnam allegories that the filmmakers were trying to make, and it’s there if you want to really dissect it, but First Blood is first and foremost an action movie, and one that delivers.  Although I could’ve done without the extended scenes of Rambo meandering through a mineshaft for what seems like FOREVER, First Blood still remains one of the best flicks Sly ever did. 

The movie starts out with the Burmese army murdering approximately 1,700 innocent civilians.  They shoot holes into infants the size of softballs, rape the women, feed the men to the pigs, molest little boys, make drugged up women do the Macarena, and force people to run the 100 yard dash on landmines.  They also cut off the people’s heads, arms, and legs indiscriminately. 

It’s worse than Philadelphia on a Saturday night. 

A bunch of Christian missionaries want Rambo to guide them up the river to help the wounded masses.  Rambo is just content on working on a fishing boat, wrangling cobras, and making homemade machetes, so he passes on the deal.  He reluctantly agrees ONLY after the cute missionary (Julie Benz, exuding a sexy Christian MILF quality) makes doe eyes at him.  So he takes ‘em up river and lets them go do God’s work, when wouldn’t you know it, those nasty Burmese soldiers turn up and take them prisoner. 

Now the head preacher man gets worried when the missionaries don’t come back so he hires Rambo to take a couple mercenaries behind enemy lines to rescue his flock.  Rambo grabs his machete and takes the mercs to the Army’s campsite.  The mercs are not Grade-A Killing Machine material, but that’s okay because Rambo is.  Since Rambo has been sitting on a fishing boat for twenty years, that’s given him plenty of time to sit around and think up ways to kill people. 

Like cutting people’s heads off, ripping out their throats, carving out their guts, blowing them up with Claymore mines and of course the old standby:  shooting people with a very big gun.  What makes Rambo different in this one is that he likes to get REAL CLOSE to people before his shoots them with a very big gun so all that’s left is itty bitty pieces. 

42,000 rounds of ammunition and 2,600 dead Burmese soldiers later, Rambo emerges from the jungle with a single flesh wound to rescue the missionaries. 

All I’m going to say is that Rambo makes Saving Private Ryan look like Sense and Sensibility. 

What we have here is the finest action movie since the original First Blood.  What we have here is the biggest body count movie of this or any millennium.  What we have here is Sylvester Stallone at the top of his game. 

Stallone paces the movie at lightning speed and once it gets going it, never lets up.  Like Stallone’s body, there isn’t an ounce of fat on it.  Whether it’s the Burmese soldiers brutally murdering the villagers or Rambo brutally murdering the Burmese soldiers, never once is there a lack of exploding body parts on the screen.  In fact, I’m pretty sure Rambo kills DOUBLE the amount of people he’s killed in the entire series in this one movie. 

My only complaint with the movie is that it ends.  I was hoping that after Rambo rescued the missionaries, he’d go back and singlehandedly liberate Burma, but oh well.  Hopefully if there’s a Rambo 5 (Fifth Blood?), Rambo can go back and blow up the half of Burma he forgot to blow up in this one. 

This was the first Rambo movie directed by Stallone and he does a fantastic job with it.  It’s certainly on par (if not better) than the first two movies and is a definite improvement over Part 3.  Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another TWENTY years for old Rambo to kick ass again. 

In addition to directing, Stallone also co-wrote this bad boy and gave himself all the best lines like “Live for nothing or die for something!”, “When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing!”, and “Fuck the world!”