Resolutions 2014: First Blood

Pilates: it’s a lot tougher than it looks.

It’s been a tidal wave of guest bloggers lately and I’m LOVING it! Seriously, you guys are making my job easy. Maybe I should just stop posting my own stuff altogether and leave it all to you beautiful, brilliant guests. It’s very tempting…but I will try, I think, to do something of my own this week. Probably. Haha. But for the time being, I have the awesome Miss Abbi here from Where the Wild Things Are–a wonderfully diverse blog with everything from film reviews to recipes to cute outfits. I highly recommend checking it out. Here’s Abbi’s take on First Blood!

There are a whole load of movies that everyone my age (just on the wrong side of 30) have seen that I haven’t. I blame it on just one thing, my parents being hardcore savers when I was a kid. Going to the movies was a kind of twice-a-year event during the school holidays; we didn’t own a VCR until I was thirteen, and when I left home at twenty-three, we still didn’t have cable. That means picking something for my resolution was quite challenging since there’s a whole pile of classics I haven’t seen.

In the end I decided to go with First Blood (1982), which I really thought was called Rambo. So that’s me starting on the back foot. I also didn’t realise that Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay…not just a, er, pretty face then.

Anyway First Blood is about John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), a Vietnam vet who finds himself on the wrong side of the law when he wanders into a small town. Despite having done nothing but look a bit scruffy, he is arrested by the town sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy), whose deputies take some pleasure in kicking the shiz out of a mostly mute Rambo. Unfortunately for them Rambo snaps, instinct takes over and he fights his way out heading for the hills. Unwilling to let things slide, Teasle launches a man-hunt but what he doesn’t know is that Rambo is green beret, trained to survive at all costs and eliminate anyone who gets in his way.

So there were things I liked about First Blood; the last five minutes where Rambo breaks down are probably the best five minutes of Stallone’s career and almost make it worth sitting through the rest of the film. I also thought the forest that he’d run off into looked amazing. I’d almost be willing to go camping there (and I don’t camp unless several major rock bands are involved). And the bit where he was trapped underground was cool and claustrophobic and exciting.

However, I couldn’t get my head around why the sheriff arrested Rambo in the first place. Maybe it’s because I have never lived in small-town America but surely you can’t just lock someone up because you think they look a bit weird? And then the manhunt undertaken to track down one obviously mentally ill drifter seemed like trying to crush an ant with a sledgehammer, especially before they became aware of his specialist training. My confusion about these elements kind of swamped some of the thematic nuances for me because there was obviously a parallel between the guerrilla Vietcong fighters Rambo had stood against in the past and the situation he now found himself in.

With just a little more exposition about Rambo’s past and possibly a little more motivation for the arrest in the first place Rambo could have been really great rather than just being for me kind of meh…

Was it a worthy resolution? Well I feel like I understand boys putting their ties around their heads at weddings a bit better now that I’ve seen it…but I can’t bring myself to give it more than a 2.5/5.

Well, sorry to hear it was a bit of a disappointment, Abbi, but thank you so much for an excellent review! Look out for some more guests this week, friends! 🙂