Rambo: First Blood Part II
Now this is more Rambo. Jingoistic, preposterous and ripe for parodies.
In the last film, Rambo killed a guy, so he is in the jailhouse now, and not just any jail. The quarry where cops with RayBans and Mossbergs patrol, while sweaty muscular prisoners bang on rock all day long for no reason.
Rambo is offered a way out of jail: a CIA black op to recon POW camps in ‘Nam. This is decades after the war, but let’s roll with it. The guy running the show is obviously evil, since he is called Murdock, but his CO reassures him all is good.
His direct orders are to confirm the camps are abandoned, but he finds some John McCains still around, while Russians show up too, for some reason.
Rambo will not stand for fellow military personnel being held is squalor over decades, so he disobeys direct orders and tries to rescue them single-handedly.
He is helped by a local intelligence office, Some Girl with an Offensive Command of the English Language. When the main John McCain was in view of the exfil helicopter, the CIA aborts the mission and hangs him out to dry (by dropping him into the water).
The Girl rescues him and he goes on a rampage, murderizing entire squads of Vietcongs and Russians too. After they decide to flee to America together, she is brutally mowed down by a guy who comes out of the blue, Bond-style.
Blind with even more rage, Rambo throws him a C4 tipped arrows and blows his body to smithereens. Those explosive tipped arrow must be nuclear powered, since they blow up a truck from hundreds of meters away.
Rambo then steals an helicopter (why do the Vietnamese have American Huey’s?), kill scores of baddies with endless Hellfires and rescues the POW. The climax is blowing up a Hind with a simple AT4 and flying the chopper even when the tail rotor is allegedly blown up.
He discharges an entire M60 over the CIA computers and threatens to kill their boss. Afterwards he walks into the sunset, abandoning America.
Turns out the red bandanna is actually a piece from the Girl’s dress, and he also wears the pendant she had. Heartfelt keepsakes, for a rampaging maniac.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.