First Blood

Owen Hughes4.0

I kind of thought it would be a mindless action film where Sly goes around killing the bad guys in the jungle with his machine gun and that's about it. Like Predator, I guess, just without the Predator.I was wrong. It's excellent. I found it very entertaining, and also quite sad. Sure, Rambo is this bad-ass, super elite soldier who can kill a man practically by looking at him, but I never realised there was a subtext quite so deep to it. The way the bent cops are almost enjoying hunting him down and killing him on "his own turf" if you like is obviously a subtle (maybe not so subtle, actually) allusion to how the American soldiers hunted down the Vietcong on their land and are always portrayed as laughing and firing on them when in reality it was horrible.It's a good film. Not even just "for an action film", but it's something I feel stupid for missing out on for so long.

Colin the dude5.0

Your daily reminder that Stallone movies never used to be cheesy, that 90-minute action movies are the best kind of action movie, that the Pacific Northwest is one of the most cinematic environments, that Jerry Goldsmith could do no wrong, that John Rambo is more-or-less a weaponized Frankenstein's monster created by Trautman, that Brian Dennehy's character has the name Will Teasle, that Stallone's body fat used to be 2.3%, that director Ted Kotcheff also made Weekend at Bernie's. That is all.

Josh Lewis4.0

The destructive echo of American foreign policy—the eternal domestic consequences of stunting generations of boys, turning them into killing machines, and then abandoning them. Law and order, indeed. Believe it was Stallone himself who said that even the most skilled killer in the world "can't kill [that kind of] hypocritical bureaucracy." You can only live with it. Also, did you see how he owns those guys with the traps like he's a slasher villain? It's sick. Full discussion on episode 8 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.