First Blood Movie Review & Film Summary (1982) | Roger Ebert
Sylvester Stallone is one of the great physical actors in the
movies, with a gift for throwing himself so fearlessly into an action scene
that we can't understand why somebody doesn't really get hurt. When he explodes
near the beginning of “First Blood”, hurling cops aside and breaking out of a
jail with his fists and speed, it's such a convincing demonstration of physical
strength and agility that we never question the scene's implausibility. In
fact, although almost all of “First Blood” is implausible, because it's
Stallone on the screen, we'll buy it.
What we can't buy in this movie is the message.
It's handled in too heavy-handed a way. Stallone plays a returned Vietnam
veteran, a Green Beret skilled in the art of jungle survival and fighting, and
after a small-town police force sadistically mishandles him, he declares war on
the cops. All of this is set up in scenes of great physical power and strength and
the central sections of the movie, with Stallone and the cops stalking each
other through the forests of the Pacific Northwest, have a lot of authority.
But then the movie comes down to a face-off between Stallone and his old Green
Beret commander (Richard Crenna), and the screenplay gives Stallone a long,
impassioned speech to deliver, a speech in which he cries out against the
injustices done to him and against the hippies who demonstrated at the airport
when he returned from the war, etc. This is all old, familiar material from a
dozen other films clichés recycled as formula. Bruce Dern did it in “Coming
Home” and William Devane in “Rolling Thunder”. Stallone is made to say things
that would have much better been implied; Robert De Niro, in “Taxi Driver”,
also plays a violent character who was obviously scarred by Vietnam, but the
movie wisely never makes him talk about what happened to him. Some things are
scarier and more emotionally moving when they're left unsaid.
So the ending doesn't work in “First Blood”. It
doesn't necessarily work as action, either. By the end of the film, Stallone
has taken on a whole town and has become a one-man army, laying siege to the
police station and the hardware store and exploding the pumps at the gas
station. This sort of spectacular conclusion has become so commonplace in
action movies that I kind of wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to see
one end with a whimper rather than a bang.
Until the last twenty or thirty minutes,
however, “First Blood” is a very good movie, well-paced, and well-acted not
only by Stallone (who invests an unlikely character with great authority) but
also by Crenna and Brian Dennehy, as the police chief. The best scenes come as
Stallone's on the run in the forest, using a hunting knife with a compass in
the handle, and living off the land. At one point he's trapped on a cliffside
by a police helicopter, and we really feel for this character who has been
hunted down through no real fault of his own. We feel more deeply for him then,
in fact, than we do later when he puts his grievances into words. Stallone
creates the character and sells the situation with his presence itself. The
screenplay should have stopped while it was ahead.
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