Rambo: First Blood Part II

Carolco Pictures | Release Date: May 22, 1985

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

47	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Tom Breihan

If you accept that Rambo is not the same kind of movie as First Blood and watch it on its own merits, it’s a badass action movie. Read full review

Gene Siskel

In short, Rambo is very good at what it does, but what it does isn't always that good. [22 May 1985, p.1C]

Salem Alaton

The direction is dynamic, the cutting has verve. To confess, Rambo: First Blood Part II is unexpectedly taut and exciting, despite its sermonizing and predictable conclusion, assuming Stallone is accepted as that impossible creation, the one-man army. [23 May 1985]

Nathan Rabin

It may be a dishonest, xenophobic, exploitative act of historical revisionism, but it's effective, and Jack Cardiff's cinematography lends Rambo's comic-book adventures an epic sweep. Read full review

Jack Kroll

What makes Stallone a figure to be reckoned with is that although these films can be looked at as sledgehammer mindlessness, they contain not only action, but a mystique of action. For all the blood and thunder, there's a strange stillness at the heart of Stallone. [27 May 1985, p.74]

Staff (Not Credited)

The body count is rising, Sly's pecs are blowing up, and Rambo himself is becoming more of a brand-name than a character, a mascot for masochism and murderous self-assertion. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The charade on the screen, which is not pulled off, is to accept that the underdog Rambo character, albeit with the help of an attractive machine-gun wielding Vietnamese girl (Julia Nickson), can waste hordes of Vietcong and Red Army contingents enroute to hauling POWs to a Thai air base in a smoking Russian chopper with only a facial scar (from a branding iron-knifepoint) marring his tough figure. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

At best, Rambo: First Blood Part II is a crudely effective right-wing rabble-rouser, the artistic equivalent of carpet bombing -- you don't know whether to cheer or run for cover. At worst, it's a tribute to Sylvester Stallone, by Sylvester Stallone, starring Sylvester Stallone. [22 May 1985, p.F1]

EmpireIan Nathan

Here is a film fully xenophobic, abhorrent film, touting guileless version of military honour, but with Jack Cardiff’s furtive camerawork and some excellent editing, it sucks you in to its disturbing heroic sweep. Read full review

Michael Wilmington

Rambo is an inane sequel to a fairly good melodrama; another example of an attempt to repeat an earlier success that goes wildly out of scale. Read full review

Vincent Canby

To anyone who doesn't share the camera's adoration, this sort of behavior becomes so comic that Rambo turns into something of a camp classic. Read full review

Pauline Kael

Rambo is to the action film what Flashdance was to the musical, with one to-be-cherished difference: audiences are laughing at it.

Dave Kehr

The picture seems deliberately trite, blunt, and manipulative, as if the producers didn't trust their audience to respond to anything else. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

All in all, it's a pretty offensive movie, especially to the Americans who fought in Vietnam. Read full review

Laurie Horn

Cosmatos' constant device of setting up the audience, releasing the tension and then setting up again gives the movie a pacing that is all manipulation. [22 May 1985, p.D1]