Rambo III (1988) on Netflix
R19881h 42mActionAdventureThriller
Rambo lives in a Thai Buddhist monastery and fights krabi-krabong bouts in Bangkok. Colonel Trautman asks him to join a CIA mission to supply Afghan rebels fighting Soviet forces. Rambo refuses.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb5.8/10151,299 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes41%
Trailer
Plot summary
Since his pardon, John Rambo has found a quiet life at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, where he helps with construction and takes prize money from krabi-krabong bouts in Bangkok. His old ally Colonel Sam Trautman arrives to ask for his help with a CIA operation that will arm Mujahideen fighters resisting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Rambo, tired of fighting, says no. Trautman goes ahead and is taken prisoner by Soviet troops at the border. Robert Griggs, an embassy official, tells Rambo what happened but will not authorize a rescue, fearing it would draw the United States into the war. Rambo agrees to go alone, on the understanding that he will be disowned if he is captured, and travels to Peshawar, Pakistan, where arms dealer Mousa Ghani agrees to take him to Khost.
Cast
- Mahmoud Assadollahias Rahim
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Rambo III (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sylvester Stallone, a fan of the fantasy film Highlander, hired its director Russell Mulcahy to make Rambo III. Mulcahy later admitted he had messed up the assignment and said Stallone politely fired him.
- Restrictions on where the unit could shoot in Israel pushed the Afghan battles to Arizona, where director Peter MacDonald hired around 250 American Civil War re-enactors to play the fighting men, work he said they loved.
- The rebel chieftain Masoud, played by Greek actor Spiros Focas, was named after the real Mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought the Soviets and later the Taliban. The production dressed its Afghans in clothing bought from Afghan refugees.
- Variety put the cost at 63 million dollars, which would have made Rambo III the most expensive film ever made at that point. People who worked on it disputed the figure, and the confusion turned out to hinge on whether Stallone's salary was counted inside the budget.
- Jerry Goldsmith wrote a long new score with the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra, but most of it was dropped and music he had written for Rambo: First Blood Part II was recycled instead. Only one of the album's three songs, Bill Medley's He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother, was used in the film.
- Because the release fell close to the Hungerford massacre, the British Board of Film Classification removed one minute and five seconds before granting an 18 certificate, and the video release cut nearly three times that. Almost everything was restored in 2000 apart from a compulsory cut for animal cruelty.
- A widely repeated story, even among scholars, holds that the closing caption once read "dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" and was quietly changed after the September 11 attacks. Contemporary 1988 reviews show it always read "the gallant people of Afghanistan".
