Rambo III (1988)

Director: Peter MacDonald

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Kurtwood Smith, Marc de Jonge

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: There’s a weird irony here that the politics of this film are the ones that almost play out like a joke. I’d bet at least some amount of money that when things came to pass—and the Carolco bankruptcy and intellectual properties were all sorted out—on a fourth Rambo movie, there was at least some talk about the story for that film involving the friends and allies Rambo makes in this film suddenly becoming the villains. That movie would have been terrible, but it’s a reality I can’t quite avoid as this one unfurls. That and the fact that The Living Daylights (1987) covered a lot of the same ground and feels like a far less perfunctory entry in its respective series.

And it’s that perfunctory quality which brings me the most down on the whole thing. This could have—and let’s face it, is—an action story that could be filled by any other icon of the 80s. John McClane could have fought with the Mujahideen (and it wouldn’t have been all that different than the later films in that series). I’d have to double check (I’m not going to), but its entirely possible there is a Jack Ryan story set entirely in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Any Chuck Norris/Jean-Claude Van Damme/Dolph Lundgren movie could have wound up there. It might have been a challenge to jam Conan the Barbarian, but an industrious (or profoundly lazy, take your pick) screenwriter could have gotten the job done. First Blood (1982) and—for better or worse—Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and even the later stories are stories suited especially for him. This ain’t that.

But do you want to know what really struck me about the whole affair. We have no way to ask the man, but I get the distinct impression that Jerry Goldsmith was at best ambivalent about his contributions to Rambo-ology. There are several cues in this score which sound like they were pulled from a soundtrack to a Friday the 13th movie. At first, I thought I was only hearing it during scenes focusing on the occupying Soviets, but I know I heard it in one scene that focused on Rambo and Rambo alone wreaking his particular brand of destruction. It’s not a bad hit on the character, comparing him with a mindless, unkillable killer, but one wonders if Stallone even noticed the comparison.

Company Business (1991)

Director: Nicholas Meyer

Cast: Gene Hackman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Kurtwood Smith, Terry O’Quinn

Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s been like one of those desert mirages in the world of cinema. It appears on a streaming service every once in a while, and then disappears just as quickly. Only I after I practically tripped over it being included in a double feature DVD with No Way Out (1987) was I able to find it on some kind of physical media.

Did I Like It: I’m tempted to say no, as the great master Meyer himself is certainly down on the film. Hackman agreed to the film, and then turned up on location not wanting anything to do with the proceedings, but facing a lawsuit if he backed out at such a late phase of the proceedings.

But Hackman doesn’t feel like the problem. He seems present enough throughout the film, not one of his all-time-best film performances, but I wasn’t struck by him being completely out to lunch. Baryshnikov isn’t at his core a movie actor, and his character breezes through the film with a perpetually confused expression. 

But the story—and it pains me rather greatly to admit it—may be the problem. It never really comes together. Maybe this is a byproduct of an editing process that had to work through a belligerent leading man’s performance to find some sequence of usable takes. Ultimately, though, I think Meyer still hadn’t worked out what he wanted to say about the end of the Cold War. For that, we’d have to wait—less than a year, incidentally—for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) to see his thoughts become more concrete. 

I’m sure a studio executive in 1990 would have blanched at the notion that that the spy movie starring Popeye Doyle would be the less successful movie about the fall of the Berlin Wall than a fifth sequel starring a cast of TV actors nearly ready to start collecting Social Security, but here we are.

Robocop (1987)

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith

Have I Seen It Before?: There’s something fascinating about the image of Robocop, as exemplified in the poster above. It enflamed the imagination of this reviewer as a child (and I’m willing to hazard a guess that I wasn’t the only one). Whenever it would air on network TV, it was appointment viewing. By the time I could procure R-rated films (and it is one of the R-iest R-rated films to come down the pike), it was one of the first I got my hands on.

Did I like it?: And it didn’t disappoint. In truth, the reality is that this film makes me angry. There’s a point about three-fourths through the film where I become pointedly depressed that in my own efforts, I’m never going to make anything as good as this. This film is so good that I have infinite patience for anything with the Robocop name on it, even when that patience is continuously tested by an endless series of lame attempts (that steadfastly avoid any understanding of what makes this film so special) to recapture the glory displayed here.

It is equal parts biting satire (that has become increasingly true), and pure Campbellian hero myth. It’s a silly title, but for my money, it’s a perfect movie.

And, yet… Now we live in an era where it is difficult to look at a cop in a film as a hero, much less a tragic one. It’s also an action movie from the 1980s; you can play any random thirty seconds and find a handful of problematic things. Take his prime directives, an attempt at a heroic code:

1.       Serve the Public Trust

2.       Protect the Innocent

3.       Uphold the Law

4.       (CLASSIFIED) Any attempt to arrest an officer of Omni Consumer Products results in shutdown.

The fourth directive is clearly the main fuel of stories involving the characters, but when you dig into it further, his very design is fascist. Everyone is theoretically innocent until proven guilty, but Robocop (Weller) has no problem eviscerating (and castrating) piles of crooks long before they’ve been able to see an attorney. With a logical flaw in his overriding programming, it’s a wonder Robo didn’t join the HAL 9000 in trying to obliterate every full-human being in sight just to make logical sense of the world.

There may be good cops, but the system is not interested in letting them stay good. That the slightest wisps of a human being encased in military hardware can still reach for their own humanity, maybe there is some hope. It is, after all, a fantasy.