Rambo/YMMV

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• Adaptation Displacement: ...not that many people had even heard of the novel.
  • Early Installment Weirdness: Then again, how many Rambo fans remember that the original Rambo (First Blood) was a depressing film about a Shell-Shocked Veteran fleeing the law?
• Awesome Music: Jerry Goldsmith (and to a lesser extent Brian Tyler for Rambo). This is especially true for Rambo: First Blood Part II, even unto the Animated Adaptation being liberally tracked with the film's score.
• Complete Monster:
  • Having disqualified themselves as human beings with their horrific acts of rape-dismemberment-and-murder, when Rambo shreds the Burmese rapists and monsters to hell with the giant Browning 50-caliber machine gun that they used to carry out the massacre of the Karen Village, the audience triumphantly cheers.
  • Special props goes to Maung Maung Khin, the guy who played the Burmese commander. He was picked to play the part as he had some understanding of how brutal the military was as he was a real life Karen Rebel.
  • Colonel Zaysen (to be fair, large proportions of the Soviet Army as well) destroys entire Afghan villages, kills innocent people, women and children with mines, bio-weapons and other evil stuff for NO REASON, even when said people did nothing at all.
• Funny Moments: When Rambo rams his tank into the Big Bad's helicopter in the finale of Rambo 3, albeit an unintentional example caused by Stallone's trademark idiotic battle cry.
  • The slack jaw, by the way, was caused by nerve damage to Stallone's face during his birth. It might look funny, but Sly literally can't help it.
• Heartwarming Moments: The end of the fourth movie has Rambo at long last going home, 30+ years after the end of the war that took him away from it, and looking behind him at the long road he's finally finished walking. The scene was poignant enough to single-handedly make everyone decide that Rambo V was a bad idea.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This line from the second movie:

Co: "Rambo! You're not expendable."

• • A truly bizarre example - the first ever review of the fourth Rambo movie went: "A glorious movie. The villains are obvious, the hero never speaks, and everybody dies." Who gave this review? Lieutenant Worf, in a Star Trek: The Next Generation Expanded Universe novel, which was written about fifteen years before the movie was filmed. It's surprisingly accurate.
• Iron Woobie: John Rambo.
• Memetic Mutation: Rambo's motto from the fourth film - "Live For Nothing, or Die For Something" - has become the rallying battlecry for Karen Warriors in real life. Stallone has called this one of the things in his life that he's most proud of.
  • NOTHING IS OVER! NOTHING! from the first film. More specifically, Stallone's melodramatic and almost incomprehensible delivery of the whole speech.
• Nightmare Fuel: The sickening brutality of the Burmese military towards the Karen villagers in the fourth film.
• No Problem With Licensed Games: A Rambo III adaptation was made for the Sega Genesis that was a pretty good run and gun.
• Retroactive Recognition: David Caruso plays one of the cops in First Blood.
• Sequel Displacement: The sequels are definitely more well known than the first film. Take, for instance, the fact that it was titled First Blood and by the third film, it was called Rambo III, or the fact that Rambo is known for high body counts, even though the grand total of dead bodies in the first film is a single Asshole Victim which Rambo didn't even kill on purpose.
• Tear Jerker: Rambo's outpouring of repressed grief at the ending of the film adaptation of First Blood is said by the author of the original novel to have saved the marriages of countless emotionally destroyed Vietnam War veterans, who afterwards learned how to cry again.
  • The heartbreaking Karen Village Massacre of the fourth movie, and to a lesser extent, the massacre of the Afghanistan village in the third one.
  • Brian Tyler's musical motif "Battle Adagio." It would take one with a heart of stone to not get teary eyed to this theme.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Most of the Rambo tie-in games aren't very good, most infamously the NES game adaptation.
• Too Cool to Live: Of all the mercenaries, only En-Joo does not survive the climax of Rambo.
• What an Idiot!: From part 4. "The dogs have led me to this old artillery shell. What's this, a string? Oh I know, I'll pull it!" (huge explosion)