Sylvester Stallone‘s Rambo franchise has become synonymous with the hulking action hero sporting a tank top and a red headband, mercilessly gunning down armies of faceless goons in peak 1980s fashion. However, it’s often easy to forget that the series started out with much different intentions in mind. First Blood was a contained survival thriller exploring the psyche of a troubled veteran, and the title character doesn’t even directly kill anyone in the first installment.
However, First Blood Part II set the precedent that the the rest of the Rambo movies would follow, right up until 2019’s Last Blood. For a long time, it looked as though Rambo III would tie things off as a trilogy, before Stallone returned to the fold 20 years later with the extravagantly violent fourth outing, and then returned once more another decade down the line.
While the star has confirmed that we’ll only be seeing Rambo again as the star of a prequel series on streaming, which is ironic considering he’s since given the same treatment to Rocky and is hoping to shop it around town, there are clearly a lot of fans willing to revisit the shoot em’ ups on Netflix, with Rambo III currently nestled in thirteenth position on the Top 10 most-watched list.
It’s arguably the second best entry in the franchise behind the original, with the hero brought out of his self-imposed exile once again when Richard Crenna’s Colonel Trautman is captured by the Russian villains while on a training mission in Afghanistan. Naturally, Sylvester Stallone‘s intrepid ex-solider takes matters into his own hands, mounting a rescue mission and blowing plenty of sh*t up along the way as he seeks to free his one and only friend.