For John Matrix, he could never escape his past as a killing machine for the US military industrial complex. Which was fine because he liked exploding people. For John Rambo, being haunted by his time in Vietnam was no laughing matter. At least, it wasn't during his introduction in First Blood, a mostly straight psychological thriller which saw his damaged vet being hunted by an antagonistic police force. Nobody actually died that time around. Things were a little different for part two. The other three Rambo movies entirely jettisoned any sense of realism, grounding or pacifist tendencies in favour of no guts, no glory action cinema, principally constructed around Sylvester Stallone's shirtless torso as he fired round after round from his gatling gun into seemingly never ending waves of bad guys. They aren't so much battles as slaughters, with the war hero being called upon again and again to deal with new threats around the world. Which he does. By mowing down anybody who gets in his way. By the end of Rambo III he'd totted up an impressive 123 confirmed kills. Which Stallone obviously took as a challenge, since when he returned to the franchise twenty years later with the singularly titled Rambo, Sly sensitively portrayed the political situation in Burma by having lots of people die. Most of them at the hands of John Rambo. We know for sure that he shot nearly a hundred people, but that's not accounting for the various animals that also got caught in his wake, or the bomb he detonated which potentially killed hundreds. Boy, those warlords seem kinda nice by comparison.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
