This is a movie that knows no good or righteous. Rambo is not the knight in shining armor who stops the villains and saves the princess. When the hero finally springs into action, all the bad things already happened and there is nothing he can do to undo this. All he can do is take revenge and that's what he does.
Rambo has changed so much during the series. In Rambos younger days, he still had some kind of honor or fought for something he thought right. Nothing of this is left here anymore. John Rambo is a paranoid, brutal man, seemingly just waiting to be "allowed" to kill, torture and dismember people.
This being said, the movie starts rather slow, building up tension. But when the levy finally breaks and the animal, that hides under the skin of John Rambo, is unleashed, there is no more comfort for anyone - not the bad guys, not Rambo, not the audience. The first kill in the movie was so brutal that the audience suddenly got very quiet.
I celebrate this movie (and the last one), because they do not play games with the audience. Since the 80s "Rambo" is the epitome of violent action movies. If you watch Part III nowadays, it looks kind of cheesy and unwillingly funny sometimes. Rambo IV and V are the answer to this. They draw the audience into this maelstrom of violence and bloodshed, they do not depict war or cruelty as something to laugh about or amusing. You want to watch a violent movie - this one is straight in your face!! That's what made Part IV so astonishingly good, that's what enables Stallone to keep his character interesting. Rambo is different, because he has seen it all. "I know how dark a mans heart can be" he says, but he is not talking about the villains.
Since the 80s Stallone and Schwarzenegger were THE two big action heroes, always competing for the crown. I always felt that Schwarzenegger was ahead of Stallone, because he had not a single really bad movie. Schwarzenegger even managed comedy (Twins for example) and even his not-so-good movies, like Kindergarden Cop are still enjoyable and very well watchable, whereas Stallone had some real bummers. But in comparison to Arnold, Stallone managed to bring all his characters, namely Rocky and Rambo to a satisfying end. Watching Rambo - First Blood now is so much more enjoyable, because you know how this character ends up some four films later. Same goes for Rocky.
Schwarzenegger never finished his characters. True, Schwarzenegger also did not "invent" his iconic characters roles like Conan or the Terminator, but none of these stories really end. The Terminator comes back in several reboots alright, but we don't have the feeling that it's THE Terminator, it's just Arnold, playing this character again, but adding nothing new or interesting to it.
I salute Stallone for his late works. He is one of the few director/actors who still manage to pull a string - and gruesomely so.
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