First Blood (1982)
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
When former Green Beret John Rambo is harassed by local law enforcement and arrested for vagrancy, he is forced to flee into the mountains and wage an escalating one-man war against his pursuers.
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8 films that influenced First Blood
What critics say influenced First Blood
Its thematic lineage is from Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder and others, brought into the '80s to give lie to Reagan's optimism ("Have a Coke and a smile," advises the billboard outside the shattered building) until Rambo's climactic peroration introduces the hawkish switcheroo.
Bruce Dern did it in “Coming Home” and William Devane in “Rolling Thunder”.
It sounds like a variation on "First Blood," but it's actually a 1977 film written by "Taxi Driver" scribe Paul Schrader and starring William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones.
Before The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and First Blood, there was 1977′s Rolling Thunder.
"Paths of Glory" is an antidote to false movies about the glories of war, nonsensical fantasies like John Wayne's "The Green Berets" or Sylvester Stallone's "Rambo."
In an odd twist of fate, James Cameron co-wrote the screenplay with Stallone, and the great Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes) served as cinematographer.
Bruce Dern did it in “Coming Home” and William Devane in “Rolling Thunder”.
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Cop Land isn't so much a police drama as a Western with a modern-day spin (it owes thanks to, among others, High Noon, Rio Bravo and 3:10 to Yuma), and writer-director James Mangold only loses control of his material during the disappointingly rote climax.
Cop Land isn't so much a police drama as a Western with a modern-day spin (it owes thanks to, among others, High Noon, Rio Bravo and 3:10 to Yuma), and writer-director James Mangold only loses control of his material during the disappointingly rote climax.
In its vintage "Dirty Harry"-style emotional strategy, the bad guys — the soldier-thugs of the Burmese government — are so irredeemably vile (when was the last time you saw a crying infant tossed into a fire?) that we lust to wipe them out before Rambo actually gets around to doing so.
Its thematic lineage is from Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder and others, brought into the '80s to give lie to Reagan's optimism ("Have a Coke and a smile," advises the billboard outside the shattered building) until Rambo's climactic peroration introduces the hawkish switcheroo.
Stallone is made to say things that would have much better been implied; Robert De Niro , in “ Taxi Driver ”, also plays a violent character who was obviously scarred by Vietnam, but the movie wisely never makes him talk about what happened to him.