First Blood (1982)

Wars never truly end for the soldiers who fought them, and a small spark can set one off again. Ted Kotcheff's "First Blood," the lean, violent film that launched the "Rambo" series, is easy to underestimate, but it was a big hit in 1982 because it was genuinely good. Sylvester Stallone, who co-wrote the script, stars as John Rambo, a drifting Green Beret veteran of the Vietnam War who wanders into a small Pacific Northwest town looking for an old Army buddy, only to learn he has died of cancer linked to exposure to Agent Orange. The town's hostile sheriff (Brian Dennehy), who doesn't like the look of the long-haired drifter, runs him out, then arrests him, and when his deputies abuse him, triggering memories of his torture as a prisoner of war, Rambo breaks free and flees into the mountains. He fights back the only way he knows how, using his survival skills and improvised traps to disable, rather than kill, the deputies hunting him, in a gripping, if far-fetched, battle for survival. When the National Guard is called in and believes it has trapped him in an abandoned mine, Rambo escapes and returns to town for a fiery showdown. Richard Crenna plays Rambo's former commanding officer, who tries to talk him down, leading to Rambo's emotional outpouring about the pain of coming home. Based on David Morrell's 1972 novel, which ends quite differently, it revived Stallone's flagging career, and Rambo became a fixture of political cartoons. Jerry Goldsmith supplies the score. But it's "Deliverance" without the moral ambiguity.