2008’s Rambo, starring Sylvester Stallone, has been analyzed by a real-life bomb expert, with surprising results.
Rambo is one of the great action franchises in film history, loaded with impressive fight scenes and explosions. And it seems that the latter are really good and realistic, according to a real-life special ops bomb technician expert.
In 1976, Sylvester Stallone marked the beginning of his path to becoming one of the great cinema icons of the last century with the premiere of Rocky, a franchise that to this day remains extremely successful and seems to have no end. His popularity was at its highest point, having starred in the first two sequels of the saga of the famous Italian Stallion when, in 1982, he arrived to leave his definitive mark on action cinema with the first Rambo movie, titled First Blood.
The film was an absolute hit, making it the first chapter of a much longer story. In 1985, Rambo: First Blood Part II was released, and in 1983, Rambo III, which seemed to be the end. But in 2008, Stallone returned to action in Rambo, which received mixed reviews. However, the action scenes were highly celebrated, and still are.
In a new video from Insider, Master EOD Technician Jay Ly broke down an iconic scene where Rambo escapes from some soldiers and a dog through the jungle, leaving them with a booby trap. The expert was pleasantly surprised by the realism of the sequence:
“How it was set up and how it was emplaced, totally legit. He had a Claymore. He put it on top of the Grand Slam bomb, huge British bomb. Claymores are used all over. They’re already wired. They’re pre-made to be set up as booby traps. That’s what they’re for. So he just had the trip wire, put something that he thought one of these people chasing him, idiots, would grab. There are 100% bomb-detection dogs, and in this clip, those dogs, I believe, are going for human detection. They’re going for sniffing out Rambo, not necessarily sniff out explosive hazards in the woods. And even if they were, those dogs are running full speed. That’s like essentially you trying to sniff a hot dog in the corner while sprinting down the hallway, like hyperventilating essentially. It’s never going to happen. Would the blast wave be that extended? I mean, it was drawn out to have that effect. The explosive component in there is torpex. They added aluminum into the composition of that explosive to extend the blast. But with that being said, that’s like a nuclear blast wave that is just kind of continuing to go out. It would be really big and done. That blast wave would’ve killed a lesser man. Not John Rambo. The explosive component in there is torpex. It’s about 50% stronger than TNT. And that’s only the blast. Frag goes exponentially further than blast does. So yeah, he is definitely within that. This is probably the most realistic clip as far as how things function and how people think. Man, I might give Rambo an eight. He’s knocked two because of survival. That’s hokey at best, even for John Rambo.”
Sylvester Stallone Wants to Keep Fighting on Screen
In 2019, Stallone showed that he still had a lot to give to action films after appearing in Rambo: Last Blood. In 2021, Stallone joined The Suicide Squad, reuniting with director James Gunn and voicing the role of the friendly but deadly King Shark. He would also come back on Gunn’s radar this year as part of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
However, the proof that he could still be an action hero came in 2022 with Samaritan, a Prime Video original film where he plays a retired superhero who must return to action to save his city and a boy who idolizes him, and in 2023’s fourth The Expendables movie. While Stallone’s time in the latter franchise has apparently come to an end, it was recently confirmed that a sequel to Samaritan is in development, so Sly fans don’t have to worry about him slipping out of the genre just yet.
