It is bigger, dumber, and more excessive than its predecessors. For many, that is a flaw. For fans of the genre, it is the ultimate guilty pleasure—a final, glorious hurrah for the muscle-bound, flag-waving action hero before the rise of the slacker anti-heroes of the 1990s.

Trautman arrives with a new mission: to provide weapons and advice to the Mujahideen freedom fighters battling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Rambo refuses, wanting no part of another war. However, when Trautman is captured by the ruthless Soviet Colonel Zaysen (Marc de Jonge), Rambo is forced out of retirement. He travels to the war-torn region, teams up with a young Afghan boy named Hamid (Doudi Shoua) and a resourceful arms dealer named Mousa (Sasson Gabai), and launches a one-man assault on a heavily fortified Soviet base to rescue his friend. If First Blood was a meditation on PTSD and Part II was a revenge fantasy, Rambo III is pure spectacle. The action sequences are relentless and gloriously absurd.

1.5/5 – A bombastic, politically tone-deaf relic of the Cold War.

Of course, within a decade, many of those same factions would coalesce into the Taliban and later al-Qaeda, becoming sworn enemies of the West. This historical whiplash has given Rambo III a strange, unintended legacy as a time capsule of Cold War geopolitics. It is a film that is both staunchly pro-American and, inadvertently, a piece of propaganda for forces that would later turn on America.