Rambo: First Blood

Watched Rambo tonight - I think for the first time but I can't be sure. When I was a kid I watched a lot of random action movies with my dad on HBO - so I'm never quite sure - but it was essentially the first time - because nothing seemed familiar...

At any rate - it was a surprisingly good movie. Rambo has become such an easily parodied idea that all I can think of when I hear/see the word "Rambo" is Charlie Sheen in Hot Shots Part Deux - so as you can imagine, I was expecting to enjoy it from a exploitation bad-is-good kind of perspective. But, it was a good film - surprisingly good musical score - lots of suspense to hold your attention well - and a decent story with somewhat of a "war is hell" anti-war/ptsd political message.

By the way - speaking of story - did you know Rambo: First Blood takes place after Vietnam entirely in the US? I didn't - for some reason I assumed all Rambo films generally consisted of Rambo killing "charlie" in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Not sure where I got that impression... maybe that's how all the sequels are?

Anyway, the acting is a little rough in places - Stallone is almost completely unintelligible at times (the end mainly) but thankfully he almost never speaks. The Colonel guy is a pretty bad actor - but his lines are mostly just there to tell us about how much of a badass Rambo is - and those lines are really only good if delivered badly.

So yeah - good stuff - very entertaining. I'll have to add a few of the sequels to my queue to see when it starts to go downhill toward inevitable self-parody.