Word: rambo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like its hero, who implausibly shoots his way through the Vietnamese countryside, Rambo: First Blood Part II has exploded through U.S. movie theaters to become a hit of totally unexpected proportions, earning a whopping $57 million during its first two weeks. (Only Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Return of the Jedi started better.) With a muzzle velocity like that, the picture is a shot in the arm to almost everyone in it, certainly including Julia Nickson, 26, the Vietnamese agent who falls in love with Sylvester Stallone. She was a $50-an-hour model in Hawaii when...
...movies of Steve Reeves, whose physique he energetically and wistfully labored to replicate. Stallone eventually took his splendidly muscled creation over into fiction. He became Rocky, the Philadelphia loser who beats up the heavyweight champion of the world. Now Stallone's pectorals and deltoids are in service again as Rambo. The name sounds like a good ole boy's rendering of Rimbaud. Rambo is a veteran who single-handed accomplishes what the U.S. Army and Marines never could do. He defeats Viet Nam. Those bullies had better not kick sand in the American face again! The movie is a great...
...What Rambo is being invited to is his least favorite kind of party, a no-win situation. Ostensibly, the unnamed clandestine agency that is paying his per diem wants him to settle, once and for all, the question of whether or not the Vietnamese are still holding American POWs. To that end, Rambo is instructed to parachute into the jungle and take pictures that will prove a known prison camp is either in use or abandoned. What his sponsors do not tell him is that the only news that is acceptable to them is that there are no enslaved G.I.s...
...seems hardly necessary to add that Rambo does discover Americans in the vilest of imaginable durances and that he (and they) are abandoned by his mission's masterminds. After being captured by the Vietnamese and their Soviet advisers, he survives one of the most vividly presented torture sequences in recent movie history. Then he rescues the prisoners and wreaks a terrible vengeance not only on their captors but on the Americans who tried to play him so false...
...most primitive level, it must be admitted, Rambo works. Its hero is like a sullen but gorgeously sculpted James Bond, impervious to pain, implacable in the face of impossible odds and impeccable in his skill with any weapon that comes to hand, be it his own customized bowie knife or the Vietnamese helicopter he casually appropriates for the finale. The long sequences in which he builds his body count to inestimable levels are well designed and well executed by Director Cosmatos. They are, in fact, so compelling that one tends to chortle in anticipation of Rambo's next superhero ploy...