Nowadays the chief claim to fame of this little bit of macho 80s tripe is, of course, the events in and regarding Afghanistan since it came out. Even the fact that this was the most expensive movie of all time when it came out--as well as one of the larger financial failures of Stallone's career--has faded from memory.
The script must have been written on a cocktail napkin: Rambo gets offered assignment; Rambo turns down assignment; Rambo's friend gets captured by bad guys; Rambo takes the assignment to rescue his friend. Standard issue action movie plot, but in this offering it's fleshed out even less than normal. For instance it's never exactly clear what the assignment IS that's offered by Rambo's former commander and his sniveling CIA sidekick (played with aplomb by Kurtwood Smith, who looks very anxious to get his paycheck and get the haole off this movie) except that it has something to do with Stinger missiles, which are never mentioned again in the picture, violating Anton Checkov's plot rule that a gun seen on the wall of the set in act one must be fired in act three. Every time the talented Richard Crenna is on the screen, another opportunity is blown for even minimal character development--the scriptwriters give him a hackneyed rant to the Russians about "you underestimated your enemy" (sounds like he's talking about Iraq circa 2003) and he spends most of the rest of the film cowering in a cell, waiting to be tortured and/or for Rambo to show up. As Troutman, Crenna never even gets a single line to say how much he misses his wife, or how he'd really like a beer, or how the sniveling CIA man let him down, or something. Yawn.
The most shocking thing is that at $63 million this is still very much a B-movie. You'd think at that price, and with exotic shooting locales like Thailand and Israel, at the very least it would look like "David Lean Meets Rambo." In fact it looks like it was filmed on the same dusty Burbank back lot where innumerable Westerns were made in the 1940s. Even the genuine Thailand locations might as well have been EPCOT Center at Disney World.
For my money my favorite part of the film is the ludicrous song played over the end credits, which is pure cocktail lounge cornball spiced up with that classic 80s My First Casio synth sound. I hoped against hope when the music credits went by I would see the title of it was "Love Theme from Rambo III," but alas, even this opportunity for a little tongue-in-cheek humor slipped the minds of the filmmakers. But then again, it's Stallone, who didn't learn to take himself with a grain of salt until the Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot era. Perhaps the addition of Estelle Getty with her .357 Magnum might have saved Rambo III from the utter waste of 102 minutes that it is.
The script must have been written on a cocktail napkin: Rambo gets offered assignment; Rambo turns down assignment; Rambo's friend gets captured by bad guys; Rambo takes the assignment to rescue his friend. Standard issue action movie plot, but in this offering it's fleshed out even less than normal. For instance it's never exactly clear what the assignment IS that's offered by Rambo's former commander and his sniveling CIA sidekick (played with aplomb by Kurtwood Smith, who looks very anxious to get his paycheck and get the haole off this movie) except that it has something to do with Stinger missiles, which are never mentioned again in the picture, violating Anton Checkov's plot rule that a gun seen on the wall of the set in act one must be fired in act three. Every time the talented Richard Crenna is on the screen, another opportunity is blown for even minimal character development--the scriptwriters give him a hackneyed rant to the Russians about "you underestimated your enemy" (sounds like he's talking about Iraq circa 2003) and he spends most of the rest of the film cowering in a cell, waiting to be tortured and/or for Rambo to show up. As Troutman, Crenna never even gets a single line to say how much he misses his wife, or how he'd really like a beer, or how the sniveling CIA man let him down, or something. Yawn.
The most shocking thing is that at $63 million this is still very much a B-movie. You'd think at that price, and with exotic shooting locales like Thailand and Israel, at the very least it would look like "David Lean Meets Rambo." In fact it looks like it was filmed on the same dusty Burbank back lot where innumerable Westerns were made in the 1940s. Even the genuine Thailand locations might as well have been EPCOT Center at Disney World.
For my money my favorite part of the film is the ludicrous song played over the end credits, which is pure cocktail lounge cornball spiced up with that classic 80s My First Casio synth sound. I hoped against hope when the music credits went by I would see the title of it was "Love Theme from Rambo III," but alas, even this opportunity for a little tongue-in-cheek humor slipped the minds of the filmmakers. But then again, it's Stallone, who didn't learn to take himself with a grain of salt until the Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot era. Perhaps the addition of Estelle Getty with her .357 Magnum might have saved Rambo III from the utter waste of 102 minutes that it is.