First Blood (1982)

Tagline: One war against one man.

Curiosity: I found a copy for $5 at Five Below. That store has such a weird collection of stuff. It’s like a couple of trucks carrying Batman toys, band t-shirts, and Beanie Babies jackknifed in front of Five Below and the store owner was like, “Dibs.” Ditto on their movie collection. I remember finding Wedding Crashers for $5 right after it came out on DVD and thinking, “This can’t be legal.”

Plot: John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is a quiet, mumbley, gorgeous homeless man/Vietnam vet trying to reconnect with one of his old war buddies. Turns out that friend died from cancer brought on by Agent Orange exposure during the war, making Rambo the last surviving member of his unit. As he drifts through a Northwestern town, he gets picked up by cop Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy). Teasle likes to keep his town bum-free, and he’s pretty aggressive about it towards Johnny. Rambo doesn’t take too kindly to being pushed around and, in his mellow way, refuses to leave town. So, Teasle arrests him. Fellow police officer Art Galt (Jack Starrett) harasses Rambo to the point of triggering a war flashback and the guy loses his shit, beats the snot out of the cops, and flees into the woods. Teasle, Galt, and co. give chase, and Rambo accidentally kills Galt in self-defense. Shit gets piled on top of more shit, as local authorities keep cranking the heat on Rambo, pushing him towards increasingly incredible feats of violence.

Thoughts: You’d never know it given the obscene amount of death in the sequels, but First Blood, the first installment in a series of confusingly named Rambo movies, is a pretty good movie on the psychological effects of war on soldiers. You could even call it a drama (Well… maybe…). Stallone slowly builds on the character’s intensity. In the beginning, he’s like a shadow of a human being, but by the ending he’s a rattling bundle of nerves and neuroses, a killing machine that can’t turn off and can’t integrate into a peaceful society. My friends and I joke around a lot about the lines “I used to be in charge of multimillion dollar equipment. Now I can’t get a job… parking cars!” But it’s a pretty sad summation of the Rambo character. As much as the Vietnam War fucked him up, it gave his character purpose. He’d developed all of these skills that are useless in peacetime. Teasle’s oppression of Rambo forces the guy to flex those old abilities and, in a weird way, makes him alive again, however temperamentally.

Ego plays such a big role in the movie. Teasle tries to crush Rambo, and that quest constantly escalates the situation. There are so many times Teasle could have ended the scuffle by letting Rambo walk away, but he can’t bear to have his power defied. Same goes for Galt. It’s a testament to Rambo’s power, then, that he never (intentionally) kills anyone (although, how responsible he is for Galt, the only character killed in the movie, is up for debate).

Reflection: Rambo kicks so many people in the balls, except for a young David Caruso.