Forty years on, here’s a rerelease of the first movie in the Rambo series from 1982: the watchable if entirely preposterous exploitation-action picture in which star and co-writer Sylvester Stallone makes his first appearance as John Rambo, the decorated Green Beret, Vietnam veteran and commando übermensch in a permanent rage at the way he and his fellow soldiers were let down. It climaxes with an entirely bizarre speech from Rambo on the subject of his PTSD, delivered in Stallone’s unintelligible slurred drone: “Igghh sawfff bodyghhh partghhs everyghrhwhere…!”
This was actually the film that came before the one that made Rambo a real movie icon, Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), where he has to go back to Vietnam for a fantasy replay of the war on the grounds that he is searching for urban-mythic “MIA POWs”. That was the movie that Ronald Reagan watched in the middle of the 1985 Beirut hostage crisis and famously said: “Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time this happens.”
