Let me start this by saying that I loved both of the first two Rambo movies. However, I liked them both for different reasons. While I did think First Blood had amazing action scenes, it really stuck with me because of its surprisingly engaging story about a war veteran trying to come home. Rambo: First Blood Part II was the opposite for me. It threw an engaging story out the window in favor of over-the-top action, and it excelled at that enough to the point where it didn’t bother me that the story wasn’t that interesting past its initial concept. Rambo III attempts this feat again, not bothering to have a good story and instead just going for action again. However, while the second movie had its great action to compensate for its poor story, Rambo III isn’t really that great of an action movie either, and so the result is a movie that’s all-around not very good.

Let’s get the story out of the way first. Much like Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo III sets up an interesting enough concept to warrant Rambo going out on another adventure. This time, his old colonel, Colonel Trautman (who was a character in the first two movies as well), has been captured and is being held hostage in Afghanistan. So, Rambo feels obligated to go and rescue him. It works well enough in the sense that it propels the main character into action, but past that there’s nothing interesting going on here. This is the main problem that Rambo III has…it’s just a boring movie most of the time. Stallone also just looks tired in the role in this movie, and so the character isn’t as compelling this time around as he normally is.

I’m sure the boring story has a big role to play in this, but the action just isn’t very interesting most of the time either. The action scenes feel really slow to me in this for some reason, and so I never fully got into them. The exception to all of this is that I think the last third of the movie does pick back up, so I had a fun time with the action by the end of it. It started to feel more like Part II again, and so there is some entertainment here if you stick with it until the end. However, a lot of the movie is just a slog, and it’s for this reason that I just didn’t enjoy Rambo III that much. It’s far from being one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen or anything that extreme, but it’s definitely one of those movies that I only recommend to people that are interested in watching the whole series. Otherwise, there are so many better action movies out there. We’ll see how the upcoming fifth entry, Rambo: Last Blood, fares, but as of right now this is by far the worst entry of an otherwise great series.

2/5