First Blood

Bounuste

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This seems like a good point to address the question: What exactly is an action movie? The answer seems kind of obvious. It’s a movie with action in it. Except that’s every movie, except maybe Andy Warhol’s “Sleep.” So how about this: It’s a movie with guns in it. And killing. And carnage. That’s closer. But not quite specific enough.

First Blood

First Blood

In “First Blood,” Rambo is a shaggy-haired Vietnam vet who drifts into the wrong small Pacific Northwest town and is harassed by an imperious local sheriff. Rambo, plagued by P.O.W. flashbacks, ends up dug in to the nearby deep woods, where he systematically incapacitates one hapless sheriff’s deputy after another. (In a strange parallel, the plot of “First Blood” is basically the same as the later action film “Predator,” with Rambo as the Predator.) The whole thing reads less as an action romp than as an earnest cautionary tale about America’s barely suppressed Vietnam trauma. And Rambo isn’t the hero. He’s the trauma.

In fact, an alternate ending was shot for the film, in which Rambo first begs his former Army colonel to kill him, then does the deed himself. That’s right, Rambo — that eventual avatar of Reagan’s gung-ho America — was, in one universe, meant to off himself. While crying. He cries at the end of the official version of the movie as well.

If history plays out twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, the same can be said of action films: “First Blood” was followed, three years later, by “Commando,” which starred Schwarzenegger as John Matrix, an entirely unconflicted ex-Special Forces killing machine. And that’s what he does: kill, mechanistically. Plus make wisecracks. It’s hard to recall now, but this convention seemed fresh, and refreshingly self-conscious, at the time. Having Schwarzenegger snap someone’s neck on a plane, cover his face with a hat and tell the stewardess, “He’s dead tired,” was, in a weird way, a precursor to the culture of knowing irony that became so pervasive 10 years later — and which (ironically) helped kill off this very brand of action movies.

Then again, the films themselves did plenty to hasten their own irrelevance, as their winks turned into ridiculous tics. Just one turbocharged decade later, we had Schwarzenegger in “Eraser,” saying, “You’re luggage,” to an alligator he just shot in the mouth, and the genre’s journey to cultural jokedom was complete.