Rambo III.

Rambo goes into a war zone to rescue Col. Trautman.

Release Date: May 25, 1988. Running Time: 101 minutes. Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone, Sheldon Lettich. Producer: Buzz Feitshans. Director: Peter MacDonald.


THE PLOT:

Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is staying at a Buddhist monastery, where he seems to finally found a semblance of peace helping the monks with repairs while competing in stick fighting matches for money. It's a simple life, but he likes it... until Col. Trautman (Richard Crenna) tracks him down to ask for his help with another mission. Trautman is leading a team into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan to supply weapons to the Mujahideen resistance.

Rambo refuses the mission, declaring that "it has to end for (him) sometime."  A few days later, an embassy official (Kurtwood Smith) informs him that Trautman has been captured by the Russians. With his only friend now being tortured in a Soviet-controlled fortress, Rambo decides to go into Afghanistan to rescue him.

Which he does, with the assistance of a quippy Afghan guide (Sasson Gabi) and a clean-cut Afghan moppet (Doudi Shoua). And a bow-and-arrow, a bunch of explosives, a rocket launcher, a tank, and his signature "hunting" knife.

Trautman is questioned by Col. Zaysen (Marc de Jonge).

CHARACTERS:

Rambo: While the second film presented a simplified version of the character, with his psychological issues stripped away, at least in that film I consistently felt that Sylvester Stallone was still playing the character of John Rambo. That is no longer the case. In the early scenes at the monastery, I don't get much sense that Rambo is either haunted and hiding or that he's content or at peace. Instead, it just feels like Sylvester Stallone is posing on rooftops or in front of wheels. In the second half, he and Trautman exchange several quips. One example: After Rambo narrowly escapes an exploding Russian bomb, Trautman asks how he is; Rambo replies, "Well done." It's amusing, in a cheesy '80s action sort of way, but it feels a lot more like Sylvester Stallone, Movie Star than like John Rambo.

Col. Trautman: In six years, Trautman has yet to be promoted to general, even after being part of a mission that returned several POW's to America. How is that possible? Whose black book did he end up in? Oh, I forgot - It's a comic book movie, and his real first name is not Sam, but "Colonel." Trautman is apparently just as superhuman as Rambo. Even after days of torture, he's in full fighting shape - and even after being shot in the shoulder by a high-caliber rifle, he is still not only able to continue fighting, but to fire a high-recoil cannon.

Col. Zaysen: Like Rambo: First Blood, Part II, this movie features a one-dimensional Russian sadist as its villain. The second film's Podovsky worked a lot better. In that movie, actor Steven Berkoff leaned hammily into the character's sadism, while the script gave him multiple scenes opposite Rambo to create a real sense of animosity between the two characters. In this movie, French actor Marc de Jonge is stuck curling his lip while barking or snarling his every (very bad) line.  His total direct interaction with Rambo lasts less than thirty seconds, with exactly two lines exchanged over a radio. Amazingly, this rather pathetic bad guy role was originally offered to Marlon Brando! I'd actually have loved to see that.  The results might well have been bad, but they certainly wouldn't have been boring.

The movie's best scene - the only scene in which Stallone plays the character rather than himself.

THOUGHTS:

I'll start with the positive - much like the movie itself does.  Rambo III gets off to an excellent start.  The opening stick fight is a terrific set piece, well-shot and tightly edited. It's also the only scene in the movie in which I see not Sylvester Stallone, but instead the character of Rambo. At first, he's clearly losing, and that makes him angry. He uses that anger as fuel to somewhat brutally turn the tables. At the end of the fight, there's a moment in which he clearly has to hold himself back from finishing his opponent. The camera holds on his face for several seconds before he finally lowers his weapons. It's sharp, visceral filmmaking that raises hopes for the rest of the picture.

Apparently, first-time director Peter MacDonald shot this sequence personally using a handheld camera. Maybe he should have gone that route for the rest of the movie... because most of the film that follows is an indifferently helmed mess. TV-style close-ups are favored over wide shots, and action scenes often resort to fast edits rather than moments of genuine excitement.

It doesn't help that the action lacks any spatial awareness, failing to convey where people and weapons are in relation to each other. Even in the climactic "tank vs. helicopter" showdown, most of it plays out in either one-shots of either tank or helicopter or in close-ups of Rambo or Zaysen.  There are only a couple of shots that show both of them in the same frame, meaning that there's no sense of the two machines hurtling toward each other until all of a second before the crash.  This undercuts the tension and eviscerates the excitement.

Even Jerry Goldsmith's music isn't as good as in previous films. In my review of the second film, I observed that the movie was carried as much by the score as by the actors. This time, much of the music is just a remix of cues from the first two films. What new music is used is mostly generic. I can only figure that Goldsmith looked at the film and decided that if no one else was going to put in an effort, then neither was he.

Rambo runs from an exploding helicopter.

THE NOVELIZATION:

As was true of the second film, First Blood author David Morrell wrote the novelization.  When adapting the second movie, Morrell scaled back the cartoonish elements, developed the characters to a far greater degree, and restored Rambo's PTSD issues... but he still stuck closely to the basic structure.  The novel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, is far more in keeping with the tone of the original book and movie than the film is, but it remains recognizable as the same story; it's just a very different telling of that story.

The same cannot be said of Morrell's Rambo III novel, in which the author more or less ignores the movie he's supposedly adapting.  The base concept is the same: Rambo rescuing Trautman from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.  Outside of that framework, however, it is a completely different story. Gone is the audience-pandering Afghan moppet.  Rambo is capable, but he's no superhero.  A UN doctor assists Rambo and fills in significant details about the larger occupation.  The Afghans are full individuals, and they are given substantially more agency than in the film. Parallels are drawn between the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and America's (and Rambo's) own war in Vietnam.

All told, it's a rather good book.  It might even make for a decent movie someday.


OVERALL:

Rambo III is every bit as dumb as the second film, but without the energy that kept its predecessor afloat. The characters are practically self-parodies; Richard Crenna even spoofed his role in Hot Shots! Part Deux, and did so by giving the exact same performance (occasionally, even delivering the same or similar dialogue).

As this was the last of the Rambo films that I watched back in the day, I'll have to hold off for two more reviews before declaring a "worst of the franchise." That said, I have difficulty believing that even the critically derided Rambo: Last Blood will manage to be worse than this.


Overall Rating: 2/10.

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