Rambo III, and the Algebra of Bad Sequels

I watch a lot of movies. Always have. For some people, watching movies is something you do on a date, or in lieu of watching television. It's a passive activity to be done when nothing else interesting is going on.

I'm the opposite. Watching movies is an active passtime. Every time I watch a new movie, I'm adding another word to my vocabulary. That, and it's fun for me. The more I work in the film industry, the more I understand movies, and the more I like watching them. I feel like I'm having a conversation with all of the people who got together to make this thing.

There are some movies I like that I've seen several times, and favorites I've seen dozens of times: RoboCop, Conan the Barbarian, The Exorcist, The Big Lebowski, The Road Warrior, Drunken Master, Fist of Legend, Dead Alive, The Shining, Ghostbusters, Evil Dead II, The Blues Brothers... there are more. They're my comfort food. They're part of my hardwiring.

But I've come to realize that, every time I re-watch one of my favorite movies, I'm not watching something new. Thus, there are some odd holes in my movie-watching. Thanks to the magic of Netflix, I've been steadily working to plug those holes, watch the classics, catch up on secondary pictures by filmmakers I like and follow-up on sequels.

This is a long-running project. I've been working on it for years, and I'll probably never be "done." When I'm 80, I'll be sitting around catching up on everything Hitchcock's ever directed.

All of this is just a run-up to explaining why I haven't seen Rambo III until last night. This might not seem like a big deal, and it isn't. But I suspect a lot of people who know me even moderately well might do a bit of a double-take. ("You haven't seen Rambo III?!") Perhaps because I have deep love for Rocky III. How could I miss out on the third installment of Stallone's other franchise?

I missed it in the theaters and there wasn't enough love out there for me to make a point of renting it. And it was never on HBO at two in the morning.

Point is, I have now seen it, and can report that Rambo III is a ludicrously bad movie. But it's also very interesting, because it was made in 1988, and Rambo is fighting on the side of heroic mujahideen in Afghanistan. It's like a strange adaptation of Charlie Wilson's War. (The non-ficiton book, I mean, not the movie... which is also on my Netflix q). Rambo III is so crazy awful, if you did a shot-for-shot remake and threw it in front of today's audiences, they would assume they were watching the latest terrible spoof from the geniuses behind Meet the Spartans.

Rambo III was produced by our friends, the now-defunct Carolco. (Though they've returned from the dead as C2, they of Terminator 3 fame). Back in the day, Carolco seemed like a somewhat better version of Cannon and Golan-Globus. While Cannon made Invasion USA, Carolco was out there with The Terminator and Rambo. That is -- relatively inexpensive genre projects that were just kinda way better than they had any right to be.

I have deep love for all of these companies. They gave me my '80s childhood. But I'm well aware most of these movies are hideously bad. The generation before me had Roger Corman. I've got Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar.

The whole time I was watching Rambo III, I thought, "This movie has a certain Golan-Globus sheen to it."

Sitcom-level direction. Clunky editing. Bad acting. Atrocious dialogue. Rambo III is the kinda movie that's so cliche at every beat, every moment that, even though I'd never seen it before, I felt like I'd seen it a hundred times. It felt like a feature-length episode from season four of The A-Team. This is the movie Team America is making fun of.

When Rambo attacks the Russian fortress in act two, we get a non-stop barrage of subtitled Russian ridiculousness.

One of the friendly mujahideen on the mission with Rambo makes a noise, attracting the attention of guards with German shepherds. One of the guards says: "Doggie, what do you smell?" When they don't find any intruders (because Rambo's awesome at hiding and shit) another guard says: "Calm, Rex. Calm, Rex." He's referring to the dog. I watched the credits very closely, and didn't find the name of the actor playing Rex the Guard Dog.

Rambo gets into a gunfight with some Russian guards. The first guy through the door yells, "To the Motherland! Charge!" When Rambo steals a gunship, the main bad guy runs outside and screams: "And who do you think you are? Stop! Wait! Who do you think you are? Stop! Wait!"

In the opening shot of the movie, we find Trautman navigating his way through an Asian bazaar. He's in full uniform, ramrod-straight, and the squarest dude on the planet. He's like the Air Force officer Fred Willard played in Spinal Tap, but this time going on an undercover mission.

From that shot alone, I knew I was in for something special.

I'd always heard about the stick-fighting scene. In a Q&A on aintitcool, Stallone said this was physically the hardest scene he'd ever shot, that the guy he's fighting really kicked his ass and stopped his heart with a body blow. I believe it -- the stickfighter is awesome to watch, lots of fun. The direction isn't the best in the world, but no worse than the Thunderdome scene in Mad Max 3. It's the only non-awful scene in Rambo III.

Stallone is at the peak of his blow-dried mulleted, Bridget-Nielsened self. From Copland on through Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, Stallone has spent decades repairing the damage he did to his career at this stage. Watching Rambo III, I could understand from whence the damage came, and how deep it went.

This movie is even worse when you consider it's the second sequel of First Blood. We've recently film schooled First Blood and Rambo: First Blood, Part II. First Blood is an adaptation of a novel by David Morrell. (Name drop -- I had lunch with him a couple of years ago, nice guy, very smart, mustache). It's more of a drama than an action movie. It reminded me a lot of Taxi Driver.

Rambo III is like having a Taxi Driver 3 where Travis Bickle decides to clean up the streets of a third-world city with a rocket launcher and painful action movie one-liners. Imagine that movie... imagine it, motherfucker.

Kurtwood Smith shows up in act one as an officer named Griggs. This was just a year after RoboCop. I've seen that movie so many times that it's hard for me to separate Kurtwood from Clarence Boddicker. You're thinking: "Ah ha, obvious villain, he must be this movie's Murdock." But you'd be wrong. Griggs comes back for one scene, and otherwise vanishes. I liked that they didn't just photocopy the evil CIA character, but I would have liked to have Clar -- ahem, Kurtwood -- around. I'm a fan.

There are absolutely no women in this movie. None. Well... there are a couple of extras who get machine-gunned by the Russian gunships. But that's it. In First Blood, Part II, Rambo had that hottie Vietnamese chick helping him out. In this movie, instead of a hottie Vietnamese chick, Rambo gets a young boy who wears a lot of mascara.

I thought the implications of that were kinda weird.

Structure-wise, this movie is very similar to John Rambo: someone's been kidnapped by villains, the good guys track down Rambo to a place where he's found some peace, ask for help, Rambo says no... has a change of heart, he hooks up with the native people, stages a big raid in act two, along the way the fight becomes personal for him, and he fights an entire army in act three. John Rambo is like the good, entertaining, well-written version of Rambo III.

Like the two movies before it, the main Rambo theme plays over the ending credits. But, while in the past it's been this very soulful, almost sad, song... here it's the worst, sub-Huey Lewis LA white guy-wearing-a-Hawaiian-shirt 80s poser rock. It's like if Dirk Diggler cut You've Got the Touch, and off that got hired to do his take on the Rambo theme. I don't understand this. Sly had the juice to co-write the script for Rambo III, but he couldn't bring Frank back? Maybe there was a falling out.

The Afghans are presented as simple, good-hearted people. At the end of the movie, an on-screen card tells us the film is dedicated to "the gallant people of Afghanistan." There is a scene between Trautman and the main Russian baddie where Trautman explains that Afghanistan is for Russia what Viet Nam was for America. This is interesting because, since Trautman and Rambo are helping the indigenous fighters, they're basically performing the exact mirror image role as the evil Russian officer and his thug in Rambo: First Bood, Part II.

And that's when it occured to me: if Afghanistan is for the USSR what Viet Nam was for the US, then Rambo III is for the Rambo franchise what Rocky IV was for the Rocky franchise.

For all the crying you hear about remakes these days, everyone seems to have forgotten that, whenever a movie spawned sequels and became a franchise, it was inevitable the sequels would get shittier. For example, I can easily say The Hills Have Eyes remake beats the living hell out of The Hills Have Eyes II.

There are some exceptions. The Psycho sequels are really good. And sometimes the sequels vary in quality: Friday the Thirteenth Part Six is way better than Five, but not as good as Two. Exorcist III isn't as good as The Exorcist, but it's fucking light years beyond The Heretic.

By and large, the shitification of franchise sequels was so inevitable, it seemed like there was an algebraic equation ruling it from behind the scenes. Something like X + Y = Superman IV.

I also realized there's a relationship between the shitty sequel and the great original, and a relationship between shitty knock-offs of great movies. Sometimes "part one" is a piece of shit, because it's just a half-assed version of a better movie.

And we've seen the reverse effect, where franchises are "re-booted" (Hollywood's term, not mine) to create a good sequel after a bunch of shitty ones. Stallone has become the guy in front of the parade on this with Rocky Balboa (which I love) and John Rambo (which I like, but I can't love until I see an extended edition). Rocky and Rocky Balboa are very similar. There's no change in the equation. But Rocky and Rocky IV are very different in almost every regard.

I'm not a super math genius. I got an A in Basic Algebra my freshman year of college only because I did the whole tutoring sessions thing with the professor. I don't have the chops to just whip out an equation. Perhaps by looking at a wide range of examples, we can find the clockwork heart ticking in these bodies of work.

There is always a specific moment when franchises jump the shark.

That stated, using the Rambo III equation as a jumping-off point, here we go:

Rambo III is to First Blood what...

Rocky IV is to Rocky.
Superman III is to Superman.
Star Trek V is to Star Trek II.
A Nightmare on Elm Street II is to A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Friday the Thirteenth Part V is to Friday the Thirteenth Part Two.
Halloween IV is to Halloween.
The Exorcist II is to The Exorcist.
Wrong Turn is to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre III is to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Iron Eagle is to Top Gun.
Delta Force is to Rambo: First Blood, Part II.
Return of the Jedi is to A New Hope.
Poltergeist III is to Poltergeist.
Temple of Doom is to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
RoboCop II is to RoboCop.
Conan the Destroyer is to Conan the Barbarian.
Blues Brothers 2000 is to The Blues Brothers.
Beyond Thunderdome is to Mad Max and The Road Warrior.
Terminator 3 is to The Terminator.
Eve of Destruction is to The Terminator.
Ghostbusters II is to Ghostbusters.
Batman and Robin is to Batman. (Though I'd have to argue on this one -- I kinda hate the first Batman, and I don't mind Batman Forever as much as a lot of people).
Hellraiser III is to Hellraiser.

I can think of more, but lunch time's over. Back to work.