Popular reviews

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★½ 5

  Rambo keeps using missiles to kill one guy at a time and, like, dude, chill out

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  Review by Obistrike ★★★★ 4

  To celebrate the birth of our beautiful daughter, I watched Rambo 2 (with headphones on). It's been a really great day!

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  Review by Mads Ej ★★★ 4

  Rambo movies ranked: boxd.it/avpYe

  Wow this was a big downgrade from the first movie. It was still enjoyable enough most of the time though, but a bit too stupid for it’s own good in many scenes. 
  The story was a bit weak and except for some fun interactions, you basically only watch this movie for the action. 
  The action was great and pretty fun. It was full of kills and big explosions but the time between the action scenes could be mildly boring. 
  The characters had no depth and the movie had none of the emotions from the first one. Rambo didn’t seem to have any ptsd or anything and he was just an ice cold killer, who showed of…

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★ 1

  trades in the first film's ambiguity and sorrow for morally bankrupt pulp; reveling in the violent capabilities of our large killing machine son (remember how they were previously investigated for horror and despair?) as he retroactively, single-handedly wins the vietnam war (lol) on a bo-gritz-style conspiracy mission (lmao) while simultaneously killing a bunch of cartoon soviets (lmfao) in the process. but goddamn if the action and images here aren't among the most muscular, vibrant and sweaty the 80s had to offer, not a small feat (*checks who shot it* ah ok, there we go), and holy shit that score. a thoroughly absurd and gorgeous piece of american propaganda. and the helicopter setpiece slaps.

  full discussion on episode 86 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by Kylo ★★★★

  I love how this franchise just went all out war in this instalment. Rambo basically blows everything up shirtless in this one. The action really does not let up. It’s a ridiculous good time. So much fun.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 8

  "Mission...accomplished!"

  i've always loved the occasionally abstract, often tableux-like action sequences: Rambo stands on a hill mowing down bad guys with an AK-47...it's basically the poster, and unsurprisingly this became a totem. certainly that jingoism seems noxious now but i'm not the first person to say it's more fascinating as a psychic time capsule than it is actually icky anymore. and the film even manages moments of grace, like when Rambo tells a POW it's 1985, and the look on the man's face is like the human equivalent of the spinning Mac pinwheel, or its fetishization (which i obviously share) of the Mil Mi-28 Hind helicopter gunship, a gorgeously bulky piece of vintage Soviet military hardware aesthetics.

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  Review by Geoff T ★★★½

  Geoff T's Rambo Marathon #2
  Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

  So how do you make a follow-up to a solid post-Vietnam drama? Screw it, just have Rambo obliterate everything in his path.

  This is the kind of movie that defines action films of the 80s, overly violent, patriotic and just plain explosive. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I enjoyed this a little more the the original. The first is clearly the far better movie, but this one as a whole just seems like more fun, as admittedly absurd it can get at times.

  Set a few years after First Blood, Rambo is imprisoned at a penitentiary after the damage he did to the town…

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  Review by Jamelle Bouie ★★ 1

  “Sir, do we get to win this time?”

  If First Blood represented Carter-era malaise, then its sequel is pure Reagan machismo, simultaneously violent and self-pitying, triumphant and aggrieved. Easily one of the most right-wing blockbusters ever made. As a film, it’s only real virtues are its cinematography and the final action sequence, which is well-paced and thrilling, even if it’s just a revenge fantasy for warmongers who blame politicians and bureaucrats for losing Vietnam.

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  Review by Deckk ★★ 3

  100-word review: Although I don't exactly always side with its politics, Rambo: First Blood Part II ('First' and 'Part II' in one title is dumb) at least restates — semi-interestingly, and semi-coherently — the first Rambo film's discussion point about a country's government's responsibility towards people who fought for them (versus the costs of veteran programs); admittedly, it does so bluntly, but it's more than I hoped for from an 80s action flick that's almost comically fast-paced, yet spends a sizeable chunk of its runtime hyping up its gruff-and-macho one-man-army hero before finally showcasing those fabled capabilities.

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  Review by Travis Lytle ★★★★ 2

  A stoic Sylvester Stallone blasts his way through the wilds of Vietnam in George P. Cosmatos' "Rambo: First Blood Part II," a solid action epic whose weaker elements are pushed aside by a straightforward, exhilarating spirit. Reprising his character, John Rambo, Stallone is the best thing about this "First Blood" sequel that plays as both an earnest apology to wronged American servicepeople and Reagan-era gunz-a-blazin' bullet-fest. The former theme is where the narrative takes shape as the film's story, circling an investigation by Rambo into troops missing in action, is steeped in skewering the bureaucracy behind the Vietnam conflict. The latter idea shapes the film as the action epic it is. Though dusted with unavoidable dubiousness in the form of the occasional flimsy performance and set-up, "Rambo: First Blood Part II" stands as a big, bold, and appealing action spectacular.

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  Review by 𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧 𝗥𝗢𝗪 𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗜𝗘𝗪 ★★

  Rolling Thunder '65
  65 movies that focus on the Vietnam War

  #41 - Rambo: First Blood Part II

  I questioned whether to even include this in my series of Vietnam films because it still pisses me off to this day how much this film switches out everything that was effective and powerful in the first installment.

  But I was in the mood for switching my brain off a bit today and there's really no better option - I'm pretty sure First Blood Part II caters adequately towards lobotomy patients.

  We pick things up a few years after the events of First Blood, in which John Rambo has, as you'd expect, been imprisoned for his earlier actions. Trautman is back though,…

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  Review by Andy Summers ★★★★ 11

  I think that when you've watched Missing In Action, the only proper thing to do is watch the film it tried to rip-off? I know that MIA came out before Sly took his sophomore bow as John Rambo, but the new found cinematic enthusiasm for POW rescue fantasies, which arguably started with Uncommon Valor, had made a sequel to First Blood a bona-fide certainty. First Blood's influence on the action genre was felt almost immediately too, a film that was a cut above the usual action fodder of the day, but this second film that took special forces veteran Rambo back into the jungles of Vietnam was always going to be a controversial one. Up went the body-count, up went…