Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Kurtwood Smith, Marc De Jonge

Director: Peter MacDonald

Summary: John Rambo has gone to live a life of seclusion in an old Buddhist monastery, searching for inner peace. When friend and mentor Col. Trautman visits to ask for his help in a secret mission in Afghanistan, Rambo declines, preferring a life of serenity. Trautman goes it alone and is captured by the enemy. Rambo must now set out to bring his old friend back to safety.

RAMBO III, which could be called "Rambo in Afghanistan," is set in 1988, near the end of the Soviet Union's involvement there. At the beginning of the film, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is living a secluded life in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. When Rambo's close friend and mentor from the American military, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), asks for Rambo's help with a top-secret mission in Afghanistan, Rambo declines. Trautman goes in anyway and is captured by a ruthless Russian commander. In response, Rambo leaves his peaceful life, determined to rescue Trautman. Armed with only a handful of glow sticks and a dozen detonators, Rambo travels to Pakistan where he meets with a group of Mujaheddin freedom fighters who agree to lead him across the border into Afghanistan. On horseback, Rambo and the Mujaheddin approach the daunting Afghan landscape--high cliffs, jagged desert mountains, and networks of underground tunnels and caves. But before they even reach the prison where Trautman is held, the Russians head them off in a high-speed helicopter chase through steep ravines. From this point forward, the action never abates. Rambo, whose complexion is a deep crimson throughout the film, scales cliffs with his bare (bleeding) hands, and defies husky guards and scores of heavily armed Russian soldiers. There are many intense parts of RAMBO III, including a disturbing look inside a shop that sells machine guns and prosthetic limbs to mine victims, and several action sequences in which Afghan soldiers use American-supplied shoulder-mount rocket launchers against the Soviets. But perhaps the most memorable scene of the film is a close-up on Rambo, alone in a dimly lit cave, where he removes a bullet from his stomach and then performs a dazzling medical trick with the leftover gunpowder.

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And the hits just keep on coming. Sylvester Stallone, who can't seem to draw flies unless he's playing Rocky Balboa or John Rambo, went back to the Rambowell (or septic system, as it were) to show his well-known solidarity with the Afghan freedom fighters who battled the Soviet army in the 1980s. This time it's personal: his handler, Richard Crenna, is captured by the Evil Empire and so it is up to Rambo to leave his work in a monastery in Southeast Asia (no, seriously) in order to rescue him from the Ruskies. Ever wonder why the Russians had such a miserable time in Afghanistan? It was because Rambo took them on single-handed and sent them packing with hammer-and-sickle all the way back to Moscow. Cartoonish action, taken ever so seriously by Stallone, who was working desperately to scrape away the unsightly wax build up from his reputation. --Marshall Fine

The Rambotrilogy is also available on DVD as a complete set.

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Theatrical Trailer, Making Of Rambo III, Behind The Scenes, Photo Gallery
Subtitles:	English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish
Year:	1988
Release Date:	July 8, 2002
Runtime:	94 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	M P 005 D
Label:	Take One Collection
Keywords:	Action, Iii, General, Wide, Screen, Rambo, Adventure
Genre:	Action/Adventure