Review of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) by Michael T — 31 Jan 2009

FIRST BLOOD was actually a pretty good film, despite Stallone's silly speech at the end that seemed to be put in to promote Reagan's foreign policy objectives. Also, the film perpetuated the myth that all Vietnam vets were ticking timebombs waiting to go off.

stallone's Rambo character is freed from a federal prison to undertake a mission to rescue American POWs still held in Vietnam and single-handedly restores American greatness by slaughtering hoardes of subhuman Vietnamese Communitsts and their Aryan-looking Russian taskmasters and then Rambo takes the time to kick the crap out of a cowardly U.

S. bureaocrat or two. Okay...This film is guilty of helping sell Reagan's narrow-minded foreign policy and perpetuating the myth that American MIAs were still POWs in Vietnam in the mid-1980s (imagine how hard that had to have been on the families of MIAs?)but now the film seems like a quaint holdover from a forgotten era; especially since the USA and Vietnam have patched up their differences and Vietnam has one of the hottest economies in Asia.