Rambo 5: God, Christ, why?!
You have to hand it to John Rambo: for a character that’s been dead since 1972, he sure gets around.
In David Morrell’s novel First Blood, Rambo (no first name given) is a scruffy hippy who runs afoul of a small town Sheriff. Things escalate and Rambo, who is actually a special forces veteran living off the grid since his experiences in Vietnam, goes berserk and kills two Sheriff’s deputies before escaping into the woods, sparking a manhunt which ultimately sees the psychotic Rambo hunting his pursuers.
It was a book that raised interesting questions — about the treatment of veterans in post-Vietnam America, about the dangers of training men to be ruthless killers without teaching them how to control those urges in civilian life, and about the fact that men struggle to communicate their emotions, often with violent consequences. At the end of the book, Rambo kills the Sheriff whose hubris brought so much destruction, before being executed like a rabid animal by his former commanding officer.
The resultant movie adaptation of “First Blood” significantly softened the story. Rambo, who was initially written to look like Kris Kristofferson, is played by the clean-shaven and likeable Sylvester Stallone. He’s a much more sympathetic character, and only kills one person in the entire movie. Even then it’s an accident. The ending was re-written so that Rambo doesn’t shoot the sheriff (or even the deputy) and is arrested instead of killed. Kirk Douglas, who had signed on to play Rambo’s C.O., walked off the project in protest.
With dollar signs in their eyes, Hollywood quickly began banging out increasingly ludicrous sequels. In “Rambo: First Blood Part II”, Rambo is given the chance to atone for his previous rampage by agreeing to a suicide mission into Vietnam, rescuing the POWs that the nefarious communists have been hiding there. In the process he blows up a lot of evil Commie gooks before returning to America and demanding that the army go and rescue the remaining POWs. He then gives a speech about wishing that America loved its soldiers as much as they loved it. The whole thing could only have been more awkwardly jingoistic if Rambo had stopped to nurse a Bald Eagle back to health and thrown some tea over the side of a British clipper.
In Rambo III, Rambo is called out of his self-imposed exile in a Tibetan monastery to help out the Taliban.
Yes, really.
It was during the Soviet-Afghan war and America was all in favour of their strange, bearded new allies and their struggle against the evils of the USSR. This was also the period where Stallone’s other iconic character, Rocky, was punching the Soviet Union right in its inexplicably Swedish god damned face.
Then, when Reagan left office and everyone calmed down a little, the era of the 1980s action ubermensch came to an end and nothing more was heard of Rambo. That was until the mid-oughts, in what film scholars will likely come to call “Sylvester Stallone’s Twenty-Seventh Unlikely Career Resurgence.”
In “Rambo,” a fourth film with the title of a standalone, Rambo is called out of his self-imposed exile in Thailand to ferry some Christian missionaries into Burma, only to see them captured and find himself forced to rescue them. Author David Morrell has said that this 2008 movie was really the first time that the character he’d envisioned had been done right. “Rambo” era Rambo is embittered, misanthropic and disgusted with his own part in the horrors of war. There’s actually a decent idea running through the movie about whether violent men have a place in society, and whether they can find redemption.
The whole thing seemed a fitting end to the series as a whole — Rambo rescues innocents by using his talent for war, and in the process seems to find some measure of peace. In the closing scene, he returns to his native America in a literal and spiritual homecoming.
So naturally, there’s going to be another one.
According to Sly Stallone’s instagram, Rambo V will be hitting cinemas next year. There are a lot of questions raised — “Jesus, why?” being first among them, “Can’t someone get Stallone a hobby?” a close second, but the biggest for me is simply: What is Rambo going to fuck up next? Because, with the benefit of hindsight, John Rambo has consistently been on the wrong side of history for his entire steroidal, shirtless career.
Ignoring the surprisingly tame first movie, “Rambo: First Blood Part Two” perpetuated the harmful myth that there were hundreds of American servicemen still held captive in secret Vietnamese prisons. Aside from bringing false hope to families in the US, this is as nonsensical as the fact that the title of the movie isn’t “Second Blood.” Why would the Vietnamese keep prisoners for a decade and not mention them? POWs are only really useful as leverage to get something from your enemies. Keeping prisoners alive for years without using them as bargaining chips is costly, complex and achieves nothing. The sad fact is that all of the Missing In Action American servicemen listed were almost certainly dead a short time after they disappeared. An early 1990s investigation into the issue, fronted by the bipartisan Senatorial team of John Kerry and John McCain (both Vietnam vets) found that there was no solid evidence for there being — or ever having been — secret American prisoners.
This investigation, incidentally, was only made possible through a thawing of diplomatic relations between America and Vietnam. Because in reality, diplomacy is usually the best way forward, not “sending an angry weightlifter with a headband.”
Rambo III, meanwhile, saw Rambo teaming up with the Taliban. There are nine or eleven reasons why America’s arming and training of the Afghan rebels has since become seen as something of a political mis-step.
Still, at least Rambo 4: “Rambo” didn’t have anything shady in it, right?!
Oh, actually, hang on. It turned out that “Rambo” became a huge political symbol for the people who were fighting against Burma’s then-authoritarian rulership. Rambo was a real inspiration to those people, and actually played a significant role in the overthrow of the Burmese government and their replacement with a democratically elected leader, who then went on to COMMIT A FUCKING GENOCIDE.
Rambo was hugely influential in ending the Burmese genocide and inadvertently causing another one. No wonder the stupid, mumbling cunt lives in isolation — every time he goes out the front door he makes the entire geopolitical situation demonstrably worse.
With this in mind, here are some ideas about where Rambo 5 should be going:
Rambo 5: The Apology Tour.
Embittered special forces veteran John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) goes around the world apologising to basically everybody. Highlights include his awkward trip to the 9/11 memorial and his lengthy tour of Rohingya refugee camps. 92 minutes, colour, some dialogue intelligible.
Rambo 5: Aryan Blood!
There’s long been a rumour that Rambo 5 will see Rambo take on Mexican drug cartels along America’s Southern Border, but given that there’s already one 72-year-old man with an unusual skin tone who famously hates Mexicans, this movie will have to go full MAGA and see Rambo’s headband swapped for a red hat. He’ll spend most of the runtime building a big wall and becoming increasingly uncomfortable with how many of his new friends are muttering Nazi slogans and creepily fond of their own sisters and daughters. Note for casting: For the MAGA characters, the sister and daughter can be the same woman.
Rambo 5: The Return of Agent Orange
Rambo gets cancer due to being played by a 72-year-old man full of weird muscle enhancing chemicals he bought from a Chinese website. Also, like a lot of veterans, he was exposed to Agent Orange in ‘Nam. Or maybe he has melanoma from never wearing a shirt. Either way, Rambo eventually finds that American healthcare is the real bad guy when he is unable to pay for treatment and had to pawn all his bows and hunting knives. Off camera, Sylvester Stallone has said he’d like to do something to highlight the plight of America’s veterans, but has since gone on to do nothing about it because he’s too busy making sequels to things.
Rambo 5: Crushing Reality
John Rambo is an old man who spends most of his day wandering into various rooms of his house and then wondering why he went in there. At the mid point of the film he reads the paper and makes himself a sandwich using a ludicrously oversized knife. He eventually decides to try and see how a Twitter works, and goes on a rampage when a fourteen year old in another state says something unprintable about his mother. Having angrily machine gunned his computer to smithereens, Rambo erroneously thinks he’s killed Twitter forever and then goes for a lie down.
Of course, if any of these actually turn out to be the plot of the next Rambo movie, someone is going to owe me a shit ton of money…