“I think Rambo’s pretty well done. I don’t think there’ll be any more. I’m about 99 percent sure.”
So ends the long journey of a pop culture icon. Despite long-standing speculation that Sylvester Stallone would write, direct and star in a fifth film in the “Rambo” series later this year, the man himself has finally come clean to Empire Magazine about his desire to retire one of his most beloved characters. Stallone had already negotiated with Millennium Films about a follow-up to 2008’s “Rambo,” which brought in $113 million worldwide on a minimal budget, but when talking to the press, the plot kept changing to the point where it seemed Stallone didn’t have a handle on where to take the character himself. Among the storylines discussed were an action picture in Rambo’s Arizona home, a child-trafficking drama in Mexico, and a sci-fi-tinged approach featuring Rambo leading a team of operatives against a genetically-altered beast, a twist loosely based off the James Byron Huggins novel “Hunter.”
Stallone probably realized he was tempting fate already with 2008’s “Rambo,” which came twenty years after the previous installment, showing the then-61 year old mowing down approximately 236 Burmese pirates. At 92 minutes no less, somehow the shortest of the “Rambo” films, which began with 1982’s “First Blood,” a movie about a brutalized Vietnam vet in a small town and adapted from the 1972 novel by David Morrell. John Rambo was killed in the book and in an early cut of the film, but the studio saw franchise potential and kept the misunderstood musclehead alive for a future installment, despite the questionable accessibility of a depressed, embattled, monosyllabic soldier.
The studio wasn’t the only one who saw him in a different light. Given a new lease on life original author Morrell wasn’t willing to grant, Stallone took ownership of the character by co-writing the second and third films with James Cameron and Sheldon Lettich, respectively. Rambo went from being a societal outcast to a secret military weapon thrust into action, even helping the Mujahedeen get out from under Russian rule in “Rambo III” (gee, thanks a lot, Rambo!). The character was soon co-opted as an unofficial mascot for military foreign relations, with President Reagan proudly flaunting a banner that read, “Rambo Is A Republican!” Long distanced from that political affiliation, Stallone wrote and directed the fourth “Rambo” on his own, featuring the character as an apolitical do-gooder struggling to find peace with his old age.
As far as franchise storytelling, John Rambo’s arc is fascinating from a sociopolitical context, even if there’s something a bit cynical about the character shedding his politics and embracing his inner animal by the time we’ve reached the “Rambo” climax. We can’t say we’re sorry to see the character go, as the final installment brought the character to a natural endpoint, but the idea of Stallone trying to top the overwhelming carnage of the last film at such an advanced age definitely sounded appealing in a guttural, primal kind of way. According to Stallone, who’s probably only got two or three more action films left in him at best, he’s more interested in sequels to “The Expendables.” “We’re already working on an [Expendables] sequel,” he said. We bet he’s already begun to fantasy-cast too.