First Blood at 40: Rambo’s first outing mixed violence with vulnerability | Sylvester Stallone
The original ending of First Blood had John Rambo, an ex-Special Forces super-soldier in Vietnam, pulling a gun from his mentor’s holster and asking him to pull the trigger: “You trained me. You made me. You kill me.” Finally surrounded after waging war against seemingly every armed man within CB range in the Pacific north-west – a local police department, inept “weekend warriors” for the national guard, the US army – Rambo wants his Green Beret Geppetto to kill him rather than the strangers that don’t understand him.…