Revisiting some movie classic from my youth, I came across “First Blood“. I remember watching it on VHS a number of times. And it’s still rather good.
I can’t explain why I never watched any of the other Rambo movies but to this day, I don’t actually want to. This movie works; both as self-contained and as a thought-provoking action movie, with multiple many-faceted characters.
Reading about the movie I was surprised that the first rough cut was more than 3 hours long and so absolutely bad that Sylvester Stallone wanted to buy the rights so he could destroy it, rather than risk it killing his career. A very successful edit brought the movie down to just over 1½ hours (and seriously – how did they pack so much story into that short a movie?) and the action classic it is.
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