Rambo: First Blood Part II

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) sends Rambo back to Vietnam and changes the direction of the series entirely. Rambo is breaking rocks in prison. His old commander arrives with an offer: photograph whether American prisoners of war are still being held in Vietnam. The mission is only to take pictures; rescuing is forbidden. When he finds prisoners he ignores the order. The real point is that the agency sending him does not want any found. The mission was designed to prove there was nobody left. The distance from the first film is large. First Blood was about a man who came back from a war his society would not accept, and it showed violence as tragedy. This is a rescue action film in which violence is triumph. The record of that shift is in the screenplay. James Cameron wrote the first draft and tried to keep the social criticism of the original. Stallone rewrote it and removed most of that layer. Cameron said afterwards that he had to distance himself from it because it was not the film he wrote; his script was violent too, but not in such an amoral way. It was an enormous commercial success and one of the films that set the eighties action template. Rambo again has very few lines. George P. Cosmatos directed. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: eighties action, followers of the series, and war adventure. Less good for: the politics are one sided, the violence is constant, and the first film's depth is gone.