For the Love of God, Please Give Us the Movie Where Rambo Fights a Monster

It's easy to write off the entire Rambo franchise as a lame, hyper-violent bacchanal, some kind of terrible machismo stew made of testosterone and greased-up triceps and spent bullet casings. And sure, that's exactly what the series has become—but it didn't start out that way. The original Rambo movie, First Blood, was more about the trauma and horror of war than anything else: Rambo is a Vietnam vet with PTSD who gets harassed by a small-town sheriff until he's forced to become a war machine again to defend himself. It's actually pretty depressing.

The Rambo sequels, though, don't bother with any of that stuff. He's just a sentient action figure who loves pummeling unsuspecting bad guys with a barrage of bullets, and each subsequent movie is shittier and more gratuitous than the one before.

But for the last decade, Stallone's been working on a new idea for a Rambo sequel that might actually revitalize the franchise—by pitting Rambo against a goddamn monster.

"It’s this amalgamation of fury and intelligence and pure, unadulterated rage," Stallone explained of the mysterious creature back in 2009, according to Bloody Disgusting. "[Rambo's] going against a feral beast that has absolute cunning and intelligence and a will to survive that is only matched by Rambo’s."

It kind of makes perfect sense: Rambo's already become a cartoon character, so let's go full cartoon, right?

Unfortunately, it sounds Stallone doesn't really agree anymore. According to a new report from Deadline, Stallone has changed his mind about the Rambo sequel, which would be based on the James Byron Huggins book, Hunter. He's still planning to adapt Hunter into a movie, which supposedly tells the story of an expert tracker who hunts down "a half-human terror created by a renegade agency that is threatening to wreak havoc on civilization." It's just not going to be a Rambo movie. It'll be a separate movie about another guy.

An unrecognizable, totally different, likely very bloodthirsty dude with tremendous muscles and a jawline like a Small Soldiers character. Nothing like Rambo at all.

This all begs a simple, important question: Uh, why? Why make Hunter a separate movie? Why not just throw Rambo in the mix to inject some much-needed fun and levity and evil mutant monsters into the franchise?

Please, Sylvester Stallone, the world doesn't need another movie where Rambo wears a cowboy hat and slaughters an entire Burmese town or whatever. Give us what we want. And what we want is to see Rambo go ham on a massive, mutant beast.

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