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Action Hero Showdown: Why John Rambo is the Baddest Man Ever Captured on Film

By Jay Pinkerton January 25, 2008 138,117 views
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A showdown between Rambo, John McClane and the T-800 to determine who is the biggest bad ass of all-time.

JOHN RAMBO

One-Sentence Summation of Franchise
If a one-man killing machine suddenly goes crazy, it would be best not to mess with him, even if you've got a ton of armed dudes with you, because he will pimp-slap the shit out of you, then stab everyone and blow up the city you're in.

Our Hero, Folks
Meet John Rambo: Special Forces veteran, Vietnam POW and sufferer of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He can survive in a forest for months with only an old tarp and a hunting knife, and he can kill you in 17 interesting and horrifying ways just by shaking your hand.

In the words of Rambo First Blood Part II's tagline: "They sent him on a mission and set him up to fail. But they made one mistake. They forgot they were dealing with Rambo." In other words, Rambo is a lot like Dr. Dre: you should never, ever forget about him. Similarly, nor should you talk about guns like he ain't got none. (Rambo does have guns.)

Level of Hardness
In First Blood, John Rambo is pushed too far by local fatassed police and is chased into a nearby forest. After running from them for the whole afternoon, Rambo suddenly stops and is all, "Wait a second, I just remembered I'm this enormous badass with decades of military training being chased by seven fatty cops." That's when he takes out an armed helicopter by throwing a rock at it while scaling down a sheer cliff-face with his bare hands, which--come on, that's pretty fucking hard.

But this ends up being the equivalent of a unicorn blowing a rainbow compared to pretty much everything in the sequel, Rambo First Blood Part II, where Rambo is dropped into a Vietnamese jungle to rescue POWs. While there, Rambo manages to kill every single Russian soldier in the occupied country, retroactively winning the Vietnam War for America. Keep in mind this wasn't even his mission: he accomplishes this with the same sort of "Well shoot, as long as I'm here" attitude you or I might adopt while running errands and deciding to pick up some steaks at the butcher's.

Apparently because he'd gotten so good at it, in Rambo III our hero's flown to occupied Afghanistan, this time to single-handedly kill the shit out of another Soviet army (he does). While shooting hordes of tank-operating filthy commies, Rambo somehow manages to get shot once. Not a problem: Rambo smartly packs his gunshot wound with gun powder, lights that bitch on fire, then cauterizes the wound with a hot knife. To put the hardness of this into perspective for you: this is a man whose solution to getting shot is to cram explosives into his body and blow up the wound to clean it. Just for the record, that's not just hard--that's actually totally motherfucking insane.

Defining Scene
Rambo is sent into Vietnam to rescue American prisoners of war, but is double-crossed by an evil army guy named Murdock (sort of a tip-off there), who abandons the mission and leaves our hero to die behind enemy lines, the bastard.

Rambo gets captured by evil Communists, who act a lot like Nazis for some reason. The evil Commies force Rambo to use an old HAM radio so they can trick the Americans into coming back to rescue him and walk into a fiendish trap.

It would be an impossible situation for anybody but Rambo, who luckily forms a brilliant plan at the last second: he uses the radio to tell Murdock he's going to boot-fuck his slimy ass when he gets back to America, then caves in a dude's skull with the radio, then stabs his way out of the enemy camp with an enormous hunting knife, then grabs a gun the size of a European car and kills every Russian in a fifty mile radius.

Seriously-we never would have thought of that.

Here we see the culmination of those events, as Rambo arrives home and expresses his frustration with bureaucracy by unloading a couple thousand rounds of ammo into a computer bank, and threatening Murdock with the giant hunting knife. We probably would have just written an strongly worded email in Microsoft Word and never sent it, but this works too.

Mitigating Factors
In Rambo III, Rambo joins up with a mujahideen resistance movement to fight back the Red Menace. One of the primary mujahideen organizers at the time this movie came out? Osama bin Laden. Whoops. Well, at least they've got a plot for the next one. Rambo IV: Correcting Past Mistakes.

Rating: 9/10
It turns out Rambo's sort of a bad-ass.

Here are a few more guys who should've been on this list: Colonel John Matrix, James Bond, Walter Kowalski and King Leonidas.

Colonel John Matrix: One-Sentence Summation of His Movie: Bottom-line: If you kidnap Arnold Schwarzenegger's daughter and refuse to give her back, you're screwed. Our Hero, Folks: He's basically T-800 meets Rambo. He loves his guns and for most of the movie he kills people delivering one-liners. At least one guy he killed by impaling him on a chair leg. That's freakin' sweet. He's also been taught to be superior to Green Berets. Level of Hardness: In the movie two dudes thought it would be sweet to have Matrix assassinate someone for them by kidnapping his daughter as a ransom. What they don't realize is that it's Colonel John Matrix, they're messing with. Whether with his bare hands or freakin' guns he's destined to end your s**t. Defining Scene: At the film's climax he conducts a one-man raid on bad guy Arius' manor with many soldiers guarding, all of whom who have machine guns. There are probably about 500 guards there and Matrix kills every single last one of them: whether with his machine gun, grenades or using some gardening tools as chakrams. Mitigating Points: Bennett did warn Arius that his soldiers are incompetent boobs. So honestly for all we know Matrix could've been just barely above-average.

James Bond: One-Sentence Summation of the Franchise: If you ever embark on a quest for world domination or disruption of world peace this guy will hunt you down and gut you like a pig. Our Hero, Folks: Bond is the epitome of cool killing people left and right and still drinking martinis, shaken not stirred. In one scene when he dunked underwater in his gadget boat he was completely oblivious that he was underwater and just straightened his tie like there's nothing wrong. Level of Hardness: For many of the movies we just thought Bond was relying on his wits and gadgets and probably was just lucky. Then Casino Royale came. Now we see that Bond doesn't have a gun because he needs it. He has a gun because he wants it. All the bad guys up to this point could've been killed if Bond used his bare hands, it just would've taken longer. Defining Scene: It's a tie between 2 scenes, both of which are in Casino Royale. Bond shows us how badass he truly is when he gets his balls whipped by Le Chiffre. Later on he kills 6 thugs with his bare hands. Also these aren't limited-edition thugs you can just abduct off the street, these are elite, Quantum thugs. Mitigating Factors: George f****n' Lazenby. 'Nuff said.

Walter Kowalski: One-Sentence Summation: Dirty Harry returns from the grave to act as a guardian angel to his Hmong neighbours and take down the Chinese Mafia because he f*****g can! Our Hero, Folks: The thing that sets Walter Kowalski apart from most badasses is that he shows us age has nothing to do with badassery. He beat up an able-bodied gang member without getting a blow landed on him. He's a Korean War veteran and he's proud of it. Level of Hardness: I'll say it again: he beat up an able-bodied gang member without getting a blow landed on him. Generally 78-year-olds versus a gang member has the obvious victor, sans here where Walter wins. Defining Scene: When he and the gang first square off they're on his lawn and he just points his gun at them saying, "Get off my lawn." When he says that you'd better considering getting the f**k off his lawn. And when he says, "I'll blow a hole through your face and sleep like a baby," you know he joking. Mitigating Factors: He's a senior citizen. Also you may win in a gunfight like that scene at the ending... but he'll outsmart you somehow.

King Leonidas: One-Sentece Summation: What if we mixed the Battle of Thermyoplyae with the most fucked-up Nightwish song you can think of? Our Hero, Folks: In the first twenty minutes of the movie you know Leonidas is not the guy you mess with... and that's before we see him fight. His rise to manhood includes killing a demonic wolf with his bare hands... and a javelin but that's beside the point. Level of Hardness: He led the Spartans. Also the narrator frequently says: "Even Leonidas [insert whatever Leonidas is doing here]". So when he says "even" you know he's badass. Defining Moment: 3 words: "This is Sparta!" Mitigating Factors: He lost at the end.

8/2/2009 12:03:56 PM
Flashpenny

Whoa, whoa. There are two much better action heroes who would whup Rambo's ass: Ah-nold in Commando and James Bond. OK Ah-nold's character is essentially the same thing so they'd end up killing each other but Bond would win. Why? What's the worst that happened to Rambo? Get put in prison. All he has to do is focus on not dropping the soap in the showers and he's good. What's the worst that happened to Bond? A guy tied him down to a chair, stripped him and whipped his balls. Oh and that same guy almost castrated Bond too. Bond's tougher. Also Rambo has to rely on what he gets, Bond has an assload of gadgets waiting for him if his guns fail him.

5/29/2009 5:25:36 PM
Flashpenny

I love Colonel Trautman because his main purpose, especially in the first movie, is to stand around and make speeches about how ball-crushingly awesome Rambo is, and how he could rip you apart with his bare hands, even if his hands were cut off and then incinerated.

11/27/2008 9:11:49 PM
Bender_Is_Great

He obviously did that to have an excuse to kill pirates and soldiers.

9/5/2008 6:36:09 PM
Elementalblazer

now, rambo is most likely the biggest badass on this list, but mcaine is definetly the funniest, and the t-8oo is basically the iphone of the bunch, -mediocre imitations of them.

8/28/2008 11:24:51 AM
willyhassertt

Burma's a warzone.

7/29/2008 5:00:58 AM
MarkyBoy27

Another mitigating factor against Rambo: his latest installment of Rambo: Rambo. His motivation in the movie is to help save p***y missionaries who he repeatedly warned not to enter genocidal Burma, but who did anyway.

7/18/2008 10:34:10 AM
jottenwe

and one more thing:
where is jason bourne on this list? He is f*****g AWESOME!!!
also, better people than John McClaine have tried to kill him...
and failed

6/14/2008 6:15:42 AM
mtrix534

also, i whole-hartedly agree with this article

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mtrix534

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