13 Best Movies From Otherwise Terrible Franchises
7. First Blood - Rambo Franchise
Other Films: Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo III, Rambo (2008) and Rambo: Last Blood.
First Blood is genuinely superb. You go in expecting an action film and while you do get many great, tripwire-tense thrills, the film is mostly a really sad and powerful movie about a Vietnam veteran returning home to a society with no place for him. First Blood is both one of the finest action flicks of the 1980s and one of the most moving action films of all time, while Sylvester Stallone is great in it.
The sequels never matched it though. It's arguable that all four of them, even the widely maligned Rambo: Last Blood, are decent, 6/10 action films and 2008's Rambo is definitely the best out of the four, but there are two things that make this franchise very frustrating.
Firstly, none of them come close to the original and secondly, they abandoned the emotional drama and social commentary of First Blood in favour of being OTT spectacles with enormous body-counts. Ironically, First Blood's body-count is only one.
The themes of PTSD were still there but were never focused on enough and these follow-ups really lost what made the first film special.