There's no justice in the world.  Schwartzenegger gets to be governor of the largest state in the country, while Stallone is reduced to direct to video thrillers and saying ridiculous things like "Youth must be served!" to crappy boxers on TV.  Of the two great muscle-bound action stars with enunciation problems, Sly was always my favorite.  It's not that his flicks were any more ridiculous or cartoonish in their level of violence than Arnold's, but Stallone always had artistic delusions of grandeur.  This meant that his movies occasionally tried to tackle some relevant social issue and usually culminated in an impassioned monologue at the end, pricelessly delivered in Sly's lugubrious slur.  Arnold's movies were silly, but he never had the balls to do something so ridiculously absurd as dedicate Rambo III to the valiant people of Afghanistan.

I hadn't seen this movie in years until last night, and it's a lot better than I had expected it to be.  Given that those expectations were founded upon my countless viewings of its two sequels, that doesn't really mean much.  Aside from being a macho action flick, First Blood also wants to be a social comment on the alienation of Vietnam veterans.  It might have worked.  That is, if the action hadn't become completely ridiculous, especially in the last third.  Or if they'd set aside a little more time for character development.  Or had better actors.

Our story begins with ex-Green Beret John Rambo (Stallone) drifting around the Pacific Northwest looking for his old army buddies, who are all dead from cancer from Agent Orange and such.  Of course, he's tramping around in his old fatigue jacket and combat boots, just to make sure everyone knows he's a maladjusted Vietnam vet.  When he's not tramping around he's probably reading Tim O'Brien books and listening to the Doors. Speaking of which, I can't believe that someone made a movie that has this much to do with Vietnam without using a single 60s tune.  Ever since The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, it's been the unwritten rule that Vietnam movies must make use of some 60s rock tune, just like every montage of film from the sixties must be set to "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield.

Anyway, Rambo wanders into some hick town where he's immediately warned off by the Sheriff, well played by Brian Dennehy, America's answer to Otm Shank.  Being Rambo, he immediately turns around and walks right back into town, where he's arrested for vagrancy in under two minutes.  Fuckin' idiot.  No wonder we lost the damn war.  The asshole deputies then rough up our hero in the jailhouse, which causes him to flashback to his torture in a Vietnamese prison camp.  And thus the can of whoopass is opened, as Rambo snaps and kicks the shit out of the entire sheriff's department, steals back his giant knife and heads for the woods.

These resulting chase and action sequences in the woods are actually pretty exciting, as Rambo jumps off cliffs and uses his Green Beret survival skills to construct traps for the cops, all of which are designed to maim rather than kill.  Only one cop is actually killed, and not intentionally.  Rambo corners Dennehy and says that he doesn't want to hurt anyone;  the dead cop wasn't his fault, but they that they pushed him.  Actually, I would say Rambo pushed it by coming back into town after being explicitly warned not to, and that if you hit a helicopter with a rock causing a man to fall out and die, than that is your fault.  But Stallone's characters never are too bright.

The movie gets worse from here on, with the arrival of Colonel Troutman (Richard Crenna).  At this point First Blood takes on a sort of horror film dynamic, as the part of Troutman is essentially the Donald Pleasance role from the Halloween movies:  the expert who turns up to tell the locals that they're dealing with an unstoppable killing machine they can't possibly cope with on their own.  And indeed Rambo is proven to be unstoppable, when the National Guard blows up a mine on top of him and it still doesn't kill him.

After Rambo escapes from the mine, he highjacks a National Guard truck and heads back to town to have it out with the Sheriff and indulge in an orgy of pointless destruction.  This is where the greatest action movie clichˇ of the 1980s is born, as Rambo wields an M-60 heavy machine gun with one hand, ammo belt slung over his other arm.  Recoil?  Recoil is for pussies!  In order to create a diversion (at least I think that's why, possibly it was just for the hell of it), our hero destroys a gas station, and then a gun store.  There's nothing more fun than wanton destruction for no good reason.  Don't tell me you never felt some maniacal urge to blast some totally innocent building into kindling.  Anyway, Rambo finally finds Dennehy in the Sheriff's office and is about to kill him when Troutman shows up to talk him out of it.

This brings on our climax, during which Sly breaks down and delivers a tearful rant about being spit on by dirty hippies and how no one respects Vietnam vets and he can't get a decent job, etc.  Of course, with Stallone shouting and crying all at once, it's kind of hard to make out.  It's especially hard to take his heartfelt plea seriously right after he's shot up most of sheriff's office with his M-60 just to shatter the glass and make papers fly around.