17 Years Later, Sylvester Stallone Proclaims This Is the Best Action Film He’s Ever Done

Sylvester Stallone’s depiction of Vietnam War veteran John Rambo received quite an evolution from 1982’s First Blood to an avenging father figure in 2019’s Rambo: Last Blood. While the franchise has long since been removed from its grounded action roots, one installment stands out among all the rest for the action icon: 2008’s Rambo. Not only did Stallone cite the fourth installment as his favorite in the series in a 2022 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, but he also ranked it against his entire filmography as “the best action film I’ve ever done because it’s the most truthful.”

Rambo hit cinemas over a year after the cinematic icon made his comeback on the big screen with 2006’s Rocky Balboa. Having already proven he could step back into the ring in his early ‘60s, Stallone returned to the jungle with a modernized depiction of the PTSD-ridden war veteran who had grown angrier and increasingly nihilistic over time. Being the only installment in the series directed by Stallone, the elevated violence factor drew a mixed reception from critics and audiences, with a 38% rotten score and a 69% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Though it continued the franchise trend of reaching cartoonish levels of entertainment, the shift to darker tones and reflection of a real-world crisis makes Rambo the best sequel since First Blood.

‘Rambo’ Spotlights a Real-World Civil War

Politics has always been laced into the Rambo DNA since the very beginning. First Blood had an underlying commentary about the mistreatment of war veterans returning home from combat zones. 1988’s Rambo III was a rescue mission premise against the backdrop of the Russian-Afghanistan conflict. The fourth Rambo installment took a unique path by spotlighting a situation that no 24-hour news network was covering at the time of release: the decades-long civil war in Burma.

Since Rambo’s last mission in Afghanistan, the once-decorated soldier has lived in seclusion in Thailand as a snake wrangler until American missionaries, including Sarah Miller (Julie Benz), offer him a paid gig to ferry them into Burma on a humanitarian assignment. They reach the hostile area only after witnessing Rambo brutally gun down pirates threatening their lives. Soon, the missionaries are taken hostage by the corrupt Burmese Army, and their pastor (Ken Howard) hires Rambo along with a band of freelance mercenaries to rescue them.

By tackling the Burma subject, Stallone shed the usual Rambo tropes of running around shirtless, blowing up helicopters, and giving big political speeches about injustice. The fourth installment returns to the grounded close-quarters combat style of First Blood while retaining the excessive body count of the previous sequels. Only this time, the gore factor of the violence is elevated to be more shocking than the D-Day sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Even though CGI enhancements dominated the action, Rambo’s violence captures the brutality that Stallone revealed to moviegoers, just how vicious a Third World nation can be when no one steps in to help.

2008’s ‘Rambo’ Is the Closest Depiction of the Original Novel

Rambo also marks Stallone’s best depiction of the Vietnam veteran since the 1982 classic. While the actor who co-wrote First Blood had softened the character to severely injure his law enforcement enemies to deviate from the psychotic killer that novelist David Morrell depicted in his 1972 novel, the subsequent sequels in 1985 and 1988 turned Rambo into a superhero for the Reagan era. The much older Rambo seen in the 2008 installment faces more disillusionment, and it’s justified by the era in which the film was produced. The events of 9/11 and the wars that followed created much anti-American sentiment around the world, just as the United States faced a crisis of conscience in the war on terror. Rambo’s reluctance to bring the missionaries to Burma is motivated by viewing the world as a horrible place where no amount of saving lives and defeating dictators will make human society as a whole any better.

Rambo set a new standard of action that Stallone carried over in the tongue-in-cheek Expendables franchise. As a story, however, it is truly the deepest and most soulful portrayal of the Vietnam veteran since the 1982 classic. Morrell would describe in his review of Rambo thatthis was the true vision he had when writing the novel. Not a supersoldier wrapping the American flag around himself, but as “angry, burned-out, and filled with self-disgust”.

Rambo is available to rent on Amazon in the U.S.