50 GREATEST FICTIONAL BADASSES

#4 – JOHN JAMES RAMBO.

Stallone is a tricky guy. For every Cop Land or Nighthawks, you get a dozen Over the Top’s or Cobra’s. Don’t even ask me to rank Tango & Cash. Being too harsh on a Kurt Russell vehicle may cause my nose to bleed. Wait, I just remembered 3000 Miles to Graceland. Fuck it, Tango & Cash sucks.

But I am, without a doubt, an unapologetic fan of Rambo. Throw all that jingoistic rhetoric out the window, Rambo is as misunderstood as Springsteen’s Born in the USA. If you’ve been marginalized at any point in your life — betrayed, snubbed, made trivial, you’ve lived in Rambo’s backyard. We not only recognize his rage, we often revel in it.

I read the novel a few years ago. The Rambo character was more merciless (yes, even that’s possible). He doesn’t just go on a rampage, he goes on a massacre — slaughtering cops, National Guardsmen, even a kid who follows his dad on the manhunt. It’s impossible to identify with a man that cutthroat. William Friedkin’s The Hunted makes the same mistake; Benicio Del Toro’s character follows the novelized Rambo’s path into overt destruction and loses our sympathies almost immediately. By the novel’s climax, the father figure wisely ends Rambo’s carnage with a merciful bullet to the head.

The filmmakers did the smart thing. By toning down Rambo’s bloodlust, they allowed him to go onto two sequels (yes, two sequels. Fear, pain, defeat and Rambo III do not exist in this dojo, sensei).

It also allowed us access to his pain. The man is not only suffering from PTSD in the worst way, he’s been set adrift by his own country and countrymen, as if he’s the Flying Dutchman, carrying the disease of defeat from a war he couldn’t (or wasn’t allowed to) win.

The first shot in First Blood is of a winding, rural road with John drifting towards a ramshackle house. Come full circle, the last shot in 2008’s Rambo has him following yet another road, yet to another house — hopefully that of his father’s. I hope he finds rest there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPC63HT5qCM

Co Bao: “Why did they pick you? Because you like to fight?”

Rambo: “I’m expendable.”

Co Bao: “What mean expendable?”

Rambo: “It’s like someone invites you to a party and you don’t show up. It doesn’t really matter.”

*PS – He can eat what would make a billy goat puke. Just try and top that, Ryan Reynolds.