This sequel advances into territory already occupied and overpopulated: the post-Vietnam War MIA rescue operation. (The director of the earlier film, Ted Kotcheff, got into that territory first, with Uncommon Valor.) Still, there is plenty of lively action, helped along by Jerry Goldsmith's thundering music and Jack Cardiff's gleaming photography. And the pivotal moment when the rescue helicopter abandons our hero amid a tightening circle of Viet Cong is a marvelously economic encapsulation of this movie's view of the war, never mind how simple-minded that view may be. This moment also marks the spot at which the movie begins its artistic nosedive, with the emergence of a stock white-collared, black-hatted American bureaucrat and a stock suave Soviet torturer ("You will talk, yes?"). The reduction of the Vietnam experience to a personal affront to our hero and a subsequent personal vendetta, however much this may reflect the bitterest feelings of some veterans, immures the movie in fantasy. As the action grows increasingly incredible (how, with Rambo on our team, did we fail to win the war in the first place?), it also grows increasingly innocuous, having no more relation to the real war than did, to an earlier war, such DC Comics as Star-Spangled War Stories and G.I. Combat. Sylvester Stallone's body-builder's physique fits in well with the comic-book ambience. And director George Pan Cosmatos, perhaps calling upon his Mediterranean heritage, gives the spectacle something of the monumentalism of, if not quite Michelangelo's Rebellious Slave, at least Steve Reeves's Hercules. Richard Crenna, Charles Napier. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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