I’m never quite sure how to make this sort of correction without sounding like a dick, but I think you need to read the Wikipedia entry a bit more closely. Fixed link.
Rambo and Teasle face off, but Rambo shoots Teasle. Trautman then shoots Rambo in the head with a shotgun from behind.
No, I was referring to the Deputy who had Rambo pinned down in the canyon and opened fire on Rambo, before our hero got a rifle and killed the dogs. I forgot about the haircut.
As to the end, and I won’t spoiler it at this point,
A resident of the neighbor hood shoots Rambo as he is heading for cover. Rambo fatally wounds Teasle. CPT Troutman has the time to hear the dying words of Troutman as he is still trying to kill Rambo. Troutman puts a shotgun blast into Rambo as he is already dying. Troutman reports to the dying Teasle that Rambo is dead.
SSG Schwartz
No dickishness felt, I assure you. I guess I just looked at the entry long enough to confirm my “face off” memory. Thanks for the correction. kicks self
To me, Rambo is what America would have produced if it needed an American version of Wolverine/Logan.
Rambo is the American Logan- that’s pretty much it for me. But then again, I saw Rambo FB when I was too young to appreciate it, so I grew up with Rambo 2 being the standard for me.
In the book Rambo is a right bastard,a killing machine that cant switch off though the circumstances have changed.
In First Blood the movie,he’s basically PTSS and just bad luck and circumstances cause the bad events that follow,you cant even blame the sherrif really whos only doing his job at the start but things escalate out of control.
Rambo is like a hunted animal and naturally his extreme training kicks in.
As to the sequals,didn’t watch them as I heard that they were silly.
Ranchoth - Let’s leave my personal politics out of this (and I assure you that I’m far from alone here). What did John Rambo hope to accomplish by “winning”? Even if he bought into the propaganda, he had to realize at some point that the cause was a lousy one. Or at the very least unfeasible. Or at least that we were going at it completely wrong. Or that in the grand scheme of things, Vietnam wasn’t really that important. Furious over how he was treated, resentful over not being able to get a job, embittered, betrayed, distrustful of authority, prone to violence, haunted by flashbacks, that I can understand. Still fuming over not “winning”, as if the Vietnam War were the World Series, no.
RikWriter - If you want to argue about how Rambo was enabling the Taliban and thus indirectly responsible for 9/11 etc., go right ahead. I’ve actually seen that argued on IMDb.com. Personally, I consider that simplistic argument hopelessly farfetched and containing more holes than Sgt. Kourov. Your call. Did Rambo do the wrong thing?
Lust4Life - Yeah. One of the things, for me, that really stood out about him is that above all else, he really wants to do good. Even in First Blood he holds back. He doesn’t kill anyone (yeah, the jerk dies, but through his own doing); he uses just enough force to get his point across. In FBP2 he risks life and limb to save prisoners of war no one else will. (And again, he can kill Murdoch, but doesn’t. The dead can’t feel fear, after all.) R3 has a memorable scene where he’s in knock-down drag-out slugfest against a great big brute. He gets the upper hand, puts his foe down, and gets ready to smash his skull in. Not only does he not, he helps his opponent up! And of course, what was a once a purely selfish mission turns into a battle to save the valiant Afghan defenders from the cruel Soviet juggernaut.
This is what’s so great about him. No matter what the situation is, no matter how scared or wounded or hungry or desperate he gets, no matter who the enemy is, he always plays the good guy. And in situations you’d never expect. (Seriously, Burma?)
Well, it was fiction, ya know? But as in real life, the mujahadin did not “morph” into the Taliban. The Taliban was created by the Pakistani ISI. There were some elements of former mujahadin in it, but most of the people we supported in Afghanistan went on to become our later allies, the Northern Alliance. And we didn’t attack Afghanistan based on some sort of “smoke screen.” That was a ludicrous statement. The man responsible for planning the attack was there and they wouldn’t give him up.
The Northern Alliance were the bunch of murdering, raping, drug-dealing thugs that made the Taliban the welcomed ‘army of scholars’ at the time. The Taliban were not created by ISI, although they were the local ‘handlers’ because the West worked through them.
The West positively encouraged our good friends the Saudi’s to stir up jihadists to fight in Afghanistan. Our fingerprints are all over the Taliban and Al-Q. It is the classic definition of ‘blow-back’.
Sorry, you’re wrong.
The Taliban were indeed created by the ISI and no, we did not create Al Quaeda. In fact, even if we had wanted to support Al Quaeda, they wouldn’t have accepted our aid…the Saudi faction in Afghanistan considered the US to be as bad as the Soviets and wouldn’t have touched CIA money with a ten foot pole.
You’ve bought into propoganda.
The novel First Blood is one of my faves… Been a long time since I read it but I may have to go back. Glad to see other folks remember it.
Anyway, the key differences between First Blood the book and First Blood the movie is that in the book, it’s just as much Rambo’s fault. In the movie as you describe he’s a shell shocked victim who is despondent when he hitchhikes across the country to see his last living Nam buddy and finds out the guy died from cancer brought on by exposure to agent orange. He wanders into Teasle’s town who doesn’t like how he looks and kicks him out. He comes back and then is beaten and ridiculed by the deputies, which leads to a flashback to his time in the NVA prison camp and he goes berserk and escapes. After that he’s hunted down by the posse who think it’s a game until Rambo turns the tables on them and gives them what they deserve.
But in the book it’s clear that Rambo is spoiling for a fight. In the movie he’s back from the war for 10 years, but in the book he’s only been home for a few months and the war is fresh in his mind. Teasle is a hard case but he’s not unreasonable, and his deputies all treat him with a lot more restraint than their movie counterparts. They don’t beat him, and treat him fairly politely but Rambo keeps seeing how hard he can push them. The first part of the book up until the jailbreak is actually a mental game between Teasle and Rambo over who is going to break first, and neither of them thinks the confrontation is going to lead to anything more than a weekend spent in jail.
Everything falls apart when they try to shave Rambo. After being viciously tortured in Vietnam he freaks out when they try to cut his hair and beard while processing him. The problem is he’s been such a dick to the cops they aren’t willing to show him any leniency and try to shave him anyway. Rambo grabs the razor and kills one of the deputies and breaks out before he even knows what he is doing and it all goes to hell from there.
Where the movie goes to show Rambo as being a sensitive victim of circumstance, the John Rambo of the book goes back to being a killing machine. There are no stab wounds to the legs here. He goes for most efficient kills possible, and when told from the police’s point of view you feel their fear and panic once they realize they aren’t just hunting down an escaped vagrant.
And after all that, the book is still about the battle of wills beteween Teasle and Rambo, how neither of them can bring themselves to back down from the fight even though both are given plenty of opportunity to do so. Neither of them are completely good or completely bad - it’s a grudge match between two very flawed people who happen to have access to guns. It’s a far deeper and more disturbing story than the one shown in the movie, and a much more rewarding experience as a result.
I merely bring up your personal politics because you seem unable to look at Rambo (or his point of view) except through the lens of your own presuppositions. That might be why, as you said, you’re having trouble “pinning him down”—if I may be so bold, you seem to be using yourself as a baseline to compare a wildly disparate person (er, “character,” anyway) to, but treating the really big differences in motivations as a dysfunction on the other subject’s part, irreconcilable to reason, or even the normal vagaries of the heart.
Granted, that’s probably something everyone does—it’d normally be hard to grok the mindset of, say, someone who runs around poking the eyes out of the most innocent-looking kittens and babies they can find, so they can collect a chorus of their screams, or something—but you seem to have, in an engineering sense, your tolerances set a bit too tight, and the works are getting gummed up.
(I, personally, of course, being an amoral borderline sociopath, have no such problems, as my brain can be dragged through any kind of murky filth, and it’ll probably still fire. 
)
All right, I won’t argue the point anymore. Really, I just thought that “Do we get to win this time?” was a weird thing for him to say. “Do we get to accomplish something this time?” would’ve fit his character much better, or even “Do we get to be the good guys again?”
Switching the subject a bit (although I’ve been meaning to get to this since the OP), what do you think about his overall physical abilities?
He can endure tremendous pain without cracking. He can quietly eliminate guards one at a time. He can wrestle a Soviet hulk, find an opening (with some difficulty), and prevail. He can pick apart an enemy search-and-destroy party piece by piece using speed and camouflage. He can run for cover like an elite VSSE agent. He can use all manner of weaponry and pilot various air and land vehicles. Amazing abilities, but not godly. You can imagine a Navy SEAL, NFL player, Olympic weightlifter, government sniper etc. doing what he does in real life. The only thing I found really egregous was that infamous kung-fu jump out of the water. (I suppose the complete immunity to hearing loss, as Roger Ebert pointed out, would qualify as well, but that certainly wouldn’t be obvious to most audiences.) One thing that deserves mentioning is that both of the times he was surrounded by a massive enemy force, he needed help just to escape.
How exactly did he get a reputation as “superhuman” and “a one man army”? (And before anyone mentions the helicopter raid, that’s a flying death machine against troops on the ground, and he has surprise on his side.)