Chapter Two
Rocky II vs. Rambo: First Blood Part II
By Brett Ballard-Beach
October 27, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Second confession: I had not watched Rocky II until last weekend. And this might simply be the afterglow of a viewing where I kept my expectations minimal, but I think it may be the most Chapter Two-iest film I have written about to date. What can I possibly mean by that? One answer is for me to paraphrase the cliché, "If you looked the word ‘sequel’ up in the dictionary, etc." That partially covers it. But I also think of the advertising slogan: Diet Dr. Pepper. It tastes more like regular Dr. Pepper. If you have ever been able to wrap your head around that, then you would understand when I say: Rocky II. It’s Rocky… only more so.
It serves just about every purpose for which a Hollywood sequel could/should be willed into existence. It begins with the closing minutes of Rocky and picks up seconds after that film ends, continuing the stories of all its characters in a logical fashion. It gives the audience exactly what it wants (or should want): another mano y mano between Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed. This directly contradicts Apollo’s last words to Rocky that there would “be no rematch” and Rocky’s response that, “I don’t want one.” As writer and now director of the franchise, Stallone has the cajones to include those lines again in Rocky II, have the characters acknowledge they were uttered, and bulldoze over them anyway.
At 119 minutes, Rocky II is exactly as long as Rocky. It follows the same format as the first film. 70 minutes of set-up/build-up, 30 minutes of training, 20 minutes of bruised faces, broken noses and spilled bodily fluids. The famed jog through the streets of Philadelphia is recreated in loving homage that adds the only thing that one could argue was missing the first time around: a multi-culti gaggle of adoring kids there to spur the Italian Stallion on as he bounds up the steps outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art (and perhaps film a commercial for the President’s Council on Fitness when they’re done).
Rocky II is unusual in at least one regard - it adds no new major (or significant minor) characters to the proceedings. Stallone graciously waited until Rocky III for the icy hand of The Grim Reaper to start bumping off his characters, so Rocky, Adrian, Apollo, Paulie, and Mickey are all there. Even local loan shark Tony Gazzo (played by creepy character actor Joe Spinell) and anonymous a capella street corner singer (the raspy tones and visage of Frank Stallone) make appearances.
What Rocky II doesn’t have is the same level of kooky eccentricities that make the first film so endearing and exasperating, in a roughly 3 to 1 ratio. This is most noticeable in the reduced screen time and slightly less abrasive manner of Paulie, Rocky’s long-time friend and eventually, brother-in-law. Burt Young inhabits one of the screen’s great grotesques to such a degree, it becomes quite possible to imagine that he isn’t acting. (Perhaps he is 20 years early in auditioning for a Harmony Korine movie?)
Paulie seethes with rage, self-loathing, bitterness, barely contained violent tendencies, and a supremely unhealthy love/hate relationship with his sister, Adrian. And yet, he is treated as an inevitable force of nature whose behavior is a given, much as Nick and Nora Charles’ constant tippling wasn’t a sign of alcoholism, simply the mark of good social drinkers. That Rocky puts up with Paulie for the course of the series (when the latter is as much to blame for Rocky’s eventual destitution as the champ himself) suggests masochistic tendencies of his own that deserve far greater analysis than I can supply here.
Moments like Paulie’s house-smashing freak-out in Rocky give the film the feel of a hoary B-movie crossed with outtakes from a Cassavetes-esque domestic drama. Like fellow early blockbuster Jaws, its pace has become downright leisurely with 35 years of hindsight. It’s a crowd-pleaser where the uplift and victory is in the underdog’s restored sense of self-worth. Rocky II, by contrast, is a soap opera for men, touching on everything from fears of fatherhood and emasculation in the home to the awesome ridiculousness of being able to pay cash for a house or a brand new black and gold Pontiac Trans Am.
In the aforementioned hour+ of plot particulars, Rocky recovers from his wounds, proposes to/marries/impregnates Adrian, goes on a spending spree (which ultimately inspires guilt), attempts to find stable work to avoid getting back into the ring (this culminates in him reduced to carrying the spit bucket at Mickey’s gym and being verbally abused, which ultimately inspires shame), and welcomes Rocky Jr. into the world, but not until after Adrian has emerged from the coma she slipped into during delivery. It’s such a breathless, browbeating first half that when the training montage finally kicks in, signaled by Rocky’s attempts to corral a chicken at Mickey’s behest, it brings an audible sigh of relief.
I read through a pair of interviews that Stallone gave to Roger Ebert around the time of Rocky II’s release and, two years later, as he was beginning to think about Rocky III. In the former he was already conflicted about the fame that the role had achieved (as opposed to making him famous) and in the latter, he expresses his desire to end the series with the third film, laying out the specifics of a grand fight at the Acropolis in Greece, which Rocky would win, and then collapse and die.
That dynamic tension that Stallone was already feeling toward his creation (which he had fought for the right to play) in 1979 is palpable in Rocky II. Rocky’s relationship towards the success he has achieved and the way in which it changes his relationship towards the people in his life and vice/versa, feels very much like Stallone’s not-so-hidden commentary on what the “million-to-one-shot” had wrought for him.
Rocky would like nothing better than the stability of a 9 to 5 job, but in the end he must confront the truth that the things he does best are pummeling someone and withstanding his face and body being ground into one giant bloody open wound. Stallone is shameless in his manipulation of the audience during the fight’s closing seconds, as shameless as Apollo’s taunting of Rocky to get him back into the ring. I would be fibbing if I didn’t say that it worked on me as well. I never imagined how sublimely nerve wracking it could be to watch barely conscious men attempt to prevent themselves from keeling over.
I don’t know how serious the talks ever were for a movie in which Sylvester Stallone would have done double-duty as both Rambo and Rocky (actually, I guess it would be quadruple-duty as he most likely would have directed and co-written). Under what auspices would they have teamed up? Immediately, I envision either a really bad version of I Spy (the Owen Wilson/Eddie Murphy version, which wasn’t spectacular to begin with) or Stallone’s own take on a Beverly Hills Cop-type fish out of water scenario, perhaps to make up for turning down that film to do Rhinestone?
But which character would have been the one outside of his element? And what tone would the film have adopted? Would it have been sentimental like 2006’s Rocky Balboa, gory and violent like 2008’s Rambo, a family-friendly wacky comedy, or some strange amalgam of all three? I also have to wonder if Rambo would have become less psychotic or Rocky more so? And what if it had been Rocky vs. Rambo? Could Rambo’s survivalist skills meet their match in Rocky’s ability to withstand an inhuman amount of punishment? It sounds obscene and atrocious to suggest such an idea, but no more so than the existence of Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot.
In the same year that Rocky Balboa stepped back into the ring to battle Clubber Lang, Stallone also made his first appearance as his other soon-to-be signature character, John J. Rambo. First Blood - helmed by Ted Kotcheff, whose career included the seriocomic football expose North Dallas Forty and the fun-with-a-corpse laughs of Weekend at Bernie’s - may have been intended as a souped-up action movie with a message (the mistreatment of Vietnam vets), but it suffers from both poor pacing, stranding the majority of the action in the movie’s first third, and a schizophrenia about how whether to position the film as a veteran’s cry for help, or a more generic everyman fighting back against an unfair system (i.e. Billy Jack with less karate, and more crazy).
Matters aren’t helped with Stallone’s ill-conceived final monologue, a howl of pain/plea for sympathy that registers instead as a wall of vowels held together by a mouthful of peanut butter. The project, based on a 1972 book, passed through innumerable hands on its way to fruition, and among the more noticeable changes in the final filmed version (for which Stallone receives co-screenplay credit) are that Rambo lives, he is painted as a misunderstood and sympathetic character, and that he wounds many but kills none. Rambo First Blood Part II (hereafter referred to as Rambo II since that title strikes me as being as egregious an affront to syntax and logic as The Neverending Story II) aimed to remedy those latter two missteps, but good.
1985 was Stallone’s commercial, and ideological, high-water mark. Between Rambo II in the summer and Rocky IV in the fall/winter, he racked up nearly $300 million in domestic receipts and an equal amount worldwide. Rambo II was the highest grossing (in straight dollars) of any film in either franchise and it is worth noting that it grossed $100 million more than any of the other three Rambos (which all settled in the $40-$50 million range). It behaved instead like a de facto Rocky sequel, grossing slightly more than that series did at its moneymaking zenith (Rocky III and IV each grossed around $125 million, with the first Rocky not far behind). Part of the huge success of Rambo II relative to First Blood could be attributed to the latter’s smash success on home video and pay cable, functioning much the same way as The Terminator did for T2, but without as long a wait.
But Rambo II also swerved the series in a radically different direction, that Rambo III and Rambo would adhere to: John Rambo was no longer a misfit fighting to get out from under the thumb of the man, but the highly skilled, nearly indestructible war machine the first film purported him to be, set loose on the killing fields of the world. He was now a man of the world with no country to call his own. If Rocky IV was the story of a Stallone character single-handedly and proactively winning the Cold War, then Rambo II is the story of a Stallone character single-handedly (almost) and retroactively winning the Vietnam War. With a screenplay by Stallone and James Cameron and direction by George P. Cosmatos, Rambo II is a working definition of what I refer to as “superaction." There is no explosion too big, no machine gun with too many bullets, no stunt fall too outrageous.
With a bare minimum of plot semantics to get out of the way (about 15 minutes worth, same as First Blood), Rambo II rescues its hero from hard labor with the chance to serve his country once again, this time on a mission to search for and document the possible existence of American POWs in Vietnam. Rambo interprets this request as “terminate Vietcong and Russian soldiers with extreme prejudice” and the film proceeds for a breathless hour or so of heads ripped by bullets, necks snapped by hands, and the occasional body detonated via explosive-tipped arrow, with only a brief pause when Rambo is captured and tortured on an electrified box spring.
If one focuses on the visceral and cartoonish action sequences (which though insanely violent are almost entirely lacking in blood and gore, another absence that was apparently rectified in the third and fourth installments, still unseen by me), it can be easy to ignore the streak of paranoia and stupidity at the heart of the film. The paranoia, a theme in films of the era such as Uncommon Valor and Missing in Action, is that the US government sold out its soldiers from the Vietnam War and that there were still large numbers knowingly being kept and tortured by the enemy. The stupidity is that, with the full intention that the mission fail, or barring that, to suppress any troublesome intelligence uncovered, the government sends in the man least likely to simply snap pictures and file a report.
Rambo waits for no man and when he commandeers a Soviet helicopter at the end and sets about indiscriminately mowing down hundreds of soldiers, it feels both exhilarating and sickening, a first generation first-person shooter game brought to life. Rambo thankfully lets his machine gun do the talking at the end (unleashing a can of whup ass on defenseless government computers and the spineless bureaucrat toady who spearheaded the mission) and keeps his tortured prose mercifully brief compared to First Blood.
But what I find most troublesome/puzzling about both films is the character of Col. Trautman (played by Richard Crenna), Rambo’s former commander and ostensibly his only friend in both films. Trautman strikes me as the Paulie and Mickey characters from Rocky combined. He’s the trainer egging him on, but also the mooch intent on dragging him down. He claims to want to help Rambo, he claims to be looking out for him, and yet in his interactions with Rambo, there is a coldness bordering on condescension. In his interactions with others, he can talk tough, but that’s all it ever seems to be, is talk. At the end of First Blood, they walk out of the police station together, captured in freeze frame. At the end of Rambo II, he turns his back on Trautman - and the world - and heads off, to nowhere, to await the inevitable sequel.
Next time: With the release of A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas just around the corner, I leave no stoner unturned, er half-baked, as I initiate a cage match of mucho munchies proportions. Dust off your wizard-shaped bong and fire up your favorite doobie: It’s Harold & Kumar vs. Bill & Ted vs. Cheech & Chong.