Danger: Live Moral Issues Rambo: First Blood Part Ii Directed by George P. Cosmatos Screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

"Sir, do we get to win this time?"

The man asking that pregnant, poignant question is none other than John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), the Viet Nam vet who was last seen in First Blood wiping out a small Western town whose citizens did not agree with his views on the historical necessity and moral value of the U.S.'s former involvement in Southeast Asia. Since that gory, not to say psychopathic, episode, Rambo has been keeping fit, courtesy of the penal system, by making little ones out of big ones in a rock quarry. But now at the gate stands his sometime mentor, Colonel Trautman of the Special Forces (Richard Crenna), offering him time off for bad behavior. There is this supersecret, supersensitive mission back in Nam . . .

What Rambo is being invited to is his least favorite kind of party, a no-win situation. Ostensibly, the unnamed clandestine agency that is paying his per diem wants him to settle, once and for all, the question of whether or not the Vietnamese are still holding American POWs. To that end, Rambo is instructed to parachute into the jungle and take pictures that will prove a known prison camp is either in use or abandoned. What his sponsors do not tell him is that the only news that is acceptable to them is that there are no enslaved G.I.s left alive. If he discovers otherwise, they do not intend to let him live to tell the tale.

It seems hardly necessary to add that Rambo does discover Americans in the vilest of imaginable durances and that he (and they) are abandoned by his mission's masterminds. After being captured by the Vietnamese and their Soviet advisers, he survives one of the most vividly presented torture sequences in recent movie history. Then he rescues the prisoners and wreaks a terrible vengeance not only on their captors but on the Americans who tried to play him so false.

At the most primitive level, it must be admitted, Rambo works. Its hero is like a sullen but gorgeously sculpted James Bond, impervious to pain, implacable in the face of impossible odds and impeccable in his skill with any weapon that comes to hand, be it his own customized bowie knife or the Vietnamese helicopter he casually appropriates for the finale. The long sequences in which he builds his body count to inestimable levels are well designed and well executed by Director Cosmatos. They are, in fact, so compelling that one tends to chortle in anticipation of Rambo's next superhero ploy, exploding with glee when it exceeds expectations. Oh, well, time enough for shame later, whispers a conscience befuddled by all the noise and excitement.

But shame there should be. For if the most basic rule of the action movie is that no dangerous live rounds should be expended in making it, it is equally true that it should avoid cheap and superficial reference to dangerous, live moral issues as well. This is the third recent movie about improbably heroic attempts to rescue POWs in Southeast Asia (the others: Uncommon Valor and Missing in Action). Whether such victims are real or a fiction, they have been pressed into the service of a dangerous popular fantasy, which is that by saving them, a galling defeat could belatedly be turned into a symbolic victory. What is worse, this childish dream of glory, and the movies that both nourish it and feed off it, vulgarizes a demonstrable anguish: that of the families whose relatives are still listed as missing in action. To put it simply, the films exploit and travesty emotions that a decent movie would try to help us share more deeply.