Cinema: Primary Colors

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FIRST BLOOD

Directed by Ted Kotcheff Screenplay by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone

Given that Sylvester Stallone has always acted more expressively with his muscles than with his mouth, one has to admire the near wordless dispatch with which those who contrived First Blood set him to maiming and killing a multitude of people in a multitude of imaginative ways. That they manage this without causing any loss of sympathy for him shows a close analysis of the problem of selling the star when he is not defending Rocky's title as the heavyweight champion of the heartwarming cliché.

Stallone plays an ex-Green Beret adrift in the Pacific Northwest, his final mooring cut loose by the discovery that his last surviving buddy from the old unit has died of cancer. Escorted out of a small town by an overzealous sheriff who mistakes him for a hippie (there is a certain antique air about the movie, which is based on a 1972 novel), he returns to assert his right to come and go as he pleases. This leads to jail, a breakout and the extraordinary wilderness chase that occupies the bulk of the film. In it, Stallone stands off not only the sheriffs blundering posse but, eventually, hundreds of tangle-footed tenderfeet from the National Guard, in the process giving an artful demonstration of guerrilla warfare. The movie occasionally pauses to strum a familiar ironic chord: that the skills that make a man a hero in war can turn him into a criminal in peacetime. But First Blood is always eager to be up and about, attending to its real business, which is the celebration of primitive masculine competence in a succession of well-made action sequences. There is a kind of purity in its pursuit of these primary movie colors. Anyway, no one can accuse the film of being talky.

—By Richard Schickel