Sylvester Stallone Says It’s His Fault Rambo Turned Into a Cartoon

The first Rambo movie, First Blood, is a survival thriller crossed with a bleak character study about a psychologically scarred Vietnam War veteran (Sylvester Stallone) who is abused by a small-town sheriff and suffers a mental breakdown. Their conflict to a tense standoff between the two men in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

The second Rambo movie, Rambo: First Blood - Part II, is a bombastic and ludicrous action movie about the same man — now magically cured of all his trauma and mental baggage — returning to Vietnam to rescue forgotten American POWs.

The Rambo sequels only got more absurd from there. In the third film, Rambo helps the Mujahideen fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan. In the fourth, he slaughters Burmese soldiers as part of a mission to rescue kidnapped American missionaries. In the fifth and easily the worst in the series, he returns to America and single-handedly dismantles a drug cartel’s human trafficking ring by turning his ranch into a Home Alone-style death trap.

These sequels may occasionally be good for a few vicarious thrills, but they are a long ways from where the character and the franchise started. And in a new interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times, Stallone blamed himself for the character’s turn into what he called “kind of like a cartoon.”

When Garcia-Navarro compared the Rambo of the later films to an “avatar” of a classic action hero with “a little less depth than the original character" Stallone fully agreed. As he put it...

Absolutely right — and that’s my fault. This is where this kind of vainglorious pomposity ... like ‘If you like that, wait until you see this!’ And I didn’t really focus on the depth of what he was still going through while trying to save POWs. He’s trying to save his own soul. We never got into that. It’s just bravado, bravado, bravado, bulletproof. And that’s all me. That’s all me.

 

Lionsgate

READ MORE: Every Rocky and Creed Ranked, From Worst to Best

Stallone added that his “clandestine narcissism” during that period of his career was “the problem” that affected those later Rambo. He came to realize, he said “This is a lot easier than showing your soul — flexing your muscles.”

“It was terrible,” he concluded. “Kind of like a cartoon.”

Cartoon or not, Lionsgate is currently in production on a new Rambo movie — the first one to date not to involve Stallone. (Who, at 80, may be a little too old to play a war veteran blowing up entire countries in the name of patriotism.) 2027’s John Rambo will instead be a prequel, with Noah Centineo playing the young version of the character during his time in the Vietnam War. Rambo’s commanding officer Col. Trautman will be played by David Harbour.

The sixth Rambo is due in theaters next summer. Will it be less cartoonish without Stallone? We’ll see.

Meanwhile, Stallone’s memoir about his life and career, The Steps, is now on sale. You can watch his full interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro for The New York Times below: