Action Hero Showdown: Why John Rambo is the Baddest Man Ever Captured on Film

JOHN RAMBO

One-Sentence Summation of Franchise
If a one-man killing machine suddenly goes crazy, it would be best not to mess with him, even if you've got a ton of armed dudes with you, because he will pimp-slap the shit out of you, then stab everyone and blow up the city you're in.

Our Hero, Folks
Meet John Rambo: Special Forces veteran, Vietnam POW and sufferer of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He can survive in a forest for months with only an old tarp and a hunting knife, and he can kill you in 17 interesting and horrifying ways just by shaking your hand.

In the words of Rambo First Blood Part II's tagline: "They sent him on a mission and set him up to fail. But they made one mistake. They forgot they were dealing with Rambo." In other words, Rambo is a lot like Dr. Dre: you should never, ever forget about him. Similarly, nor should you talk about guns like he ain't got none. (Rambo does have guns.)

Level of Hardness
In First Blood, John Rambo is pushed too far by local fatassed police and is chased into a nearby forest. After running from them for the whole afternoon, Rambo suddenly stops and is all, "Wait a second, I just remembered I'm this enormous badass with decades of military training being chased by seven fatty cops." That's when he takes out an armed helicopter by throwing a rock at it while scaling down a sheer cliff-face with his bare hands, which--come on, that's pretty fucking hard.

But this ends up being the equivalent of a unicorn blowing a rainbow compared to pretty much everything in the sequel, Rambo First Blood Part II, where Rambo is dropped into a Vietnamese jungle to rescue POWs. While there, Rambo manages to kill every single Russian soldier in the occupied country, retroactively winning the Vietnam War for America. Keep in mind this wasn't even his mission: he accomplishes this with the same sort of "Well shoot, as long as I'm here" attitude you or I might adopt while running errands and deciding to pick up some steaks at the butcher's.

Apparently because he'd gotten so good at it, in Rambo III our hero's flown to occupied Afghanistan, this time to single-handedly kill the shit out of another Soviet army (he does). While shooting hordes of tank-operating filthy commies, Rambo somehow manages to get shot once. Not a problem: Rambo smartly packs his gunshot wound with gun powder, lights that bitch on fire, then cauterizes the wound with a hot knife. To put the hardness of this into perspective for you: this is a man whose solution to getting shot is to cram explosives into his body and blow up the wound to clean it. Just for the record, that's not just hard--that's actually totally motherfucking insane.

Defining Scene
Rambo is sent into Vietnam to rescue American prisoners of war, but is double-crossed by an evil army guy named Murdock (sort of a tip-off there), who abandons the mission and leaves our hero to die behind enemy lines, the bastard.

Rambo gets captured by evil Communists, who act a lot like Nazis for some reason. The evil Commies force Rambo to use an old HAM radio so they can trick the Americans into coming back to rescue him and walk into a fiendish trap.

It would be an impossible situation for anybody but Rambo, who luckily forms a brilliant plan at the last second: he uses the radio to tell Murdock he's going to boot-fuck his slimy ass when he gets back to America, then caves in a dude's skull with the radio, then stabs his way out of the enemy camp with an enormous hunting knife, then grabs a gun the size of a European car and kills every Russian in a fifty mile radius.

Seriously-we never would have thought of that.

Here we see the culmination of those events, as Rambo arrives home and expresses his frustration with bureaucracy by unloading a couple thousand rounds of ammo into a computer bank, and threatening Murdock with the giant hunting knife. We probably would have just written an strongly worded email in Microsoft Word and never sent it, but this works too.

JOHN McCLANE

One-Sentence Summation of Franchise
If you're a European terrorist and you find yourself thinking, "How much trouble could one pesky renegade cop crawling around in some air vents cause my nefarious plan?", you should really take a minute to rethink your strategy, because he's about to jump out of an elevator shaft barefoot and fuck you up pretty bad.

Our Hero, Folks
Meet John McClane: a semi-alcoholic, chain-smoking New York City police detective with the creepy ability to always be in an air vent and wearing a soiled undershirt for some reason whenever terrorists take hostages.

In the words of the original Die Hard's tagline: "Twelve terrorists. One cop. The odds are against John McClane... That's just the way he likes it." This is all you need to know about John McClane: he hates a fair fight, and evidently prefers it when his enemies outnumber him and he's hopelessly outmatched. Why? It's possible he's an idiot. Still, he's pretty handy at shooting terrorists, so whatever helps him get through the day, right?

Level of Hardness
John McClane's Hardness Level gets a huge boost for the fact that, unlike the other action heroes on this list, he's not a by-design killing machine so much as a really, really unlucky dude with a receding hairline and good aim. A killer robot from the future could take out a dozen terrorists on the way to his real mission to beat Godzilla to death with a nuclear submarine-but when you're just some guy with a badge and a gun, taking out twelve heavily armed bad guys is hell of impressive.

In the first Die Hard, John McClane's visiting his ex-wife when Alan Rickman's all-star terrorist squad attacks the building where she works and forces him to get down to killin' business. Not only does he dispatch all of the terrorists one by one, in a series of increasingly cool fight scenes, but he also manages to do it without shoes. This doesn't seem like a big deal until you account for all the broken glass and debris left behind from the many shootouts, and realize McClane's picking glass chunks the size of postcards out of his feet in between fights. Walking on broken glass while killing guys: pretty hard.

In Die Hard 2, McClane does pretty much the same thing as in the first movie, only this time he's wearing a black undershirt and the terrorists are... well, still European. He does manage to launch himself out of an airplane cockpit in this one, though, while fighting a terrorist with a bomb about to go off. McClane straps himself into the cockpit seat and pulls the emergency escape pod lever (standard in any commercial aircraft) at the last second, shooting himself hundreds of feet into the air while all the shit explodes, then pulling the ripcord for the parachute--again, at the last second. It's pretty ingenious, looks totally cool and contains maximum amounts of hardness, so it should be forgiven that it doesn't make an ounce of goddamn sense.

The third installment of the franchise, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, takes place outside in the streets of New York. Since this runs counter to the entire premise of Die Hard, we're not going to discuss it here. It'd be like making a Speed sequel and forcing Keanu Reeves to commandeer a bus that can go whatever speed it likes. That's not hard; that's just lazy.

Defining Scenes
Though the intricacies of a Bruce Willis Die Hard performance are of course as delicate as they are complex, you can pretty much be guaranteed to see the following in any decent installment:

John McClane killing some dude with the clock ticking:

John McClane coming within a cockhair of getting incinerated by a huge explosion:

And, of course, John McClane crawling around in duct work talking to himself like a crazy person:

Basically the entire Die Hard franchise hinges on terrorists attacking a building with central air.

Mitigating Factors
In pretty much any Die Hard movie you can name, it's eventually revealed that the terrorists aren't really terrorists at all, just thieves with a love of overly-elaborate money-stealing schemes. Since that means the hostages' lives aren't really in danger, and all the bad guys want at the end of the day is to empty out a safe full of money and be on their way... well, technically, that means things probably would have been better if John McClane had never gotten involved.

Seriously, think about it: remove John McClane from the first movie and you've got a successful heist with a body count of like one guy. Add in John McClane Yippee-Kay-Aying around shooting everything and you've got a stack of corpses and property damage in the hundreds of millions.

I mean, his heart's in the right place, but... dude, you know this money's insured, right? We appreciate the concern and all, but really, the faceless corporation/enormous airport's gonna be okay. Please stop shooting European men in the face and blowing up property.

Rating: 7/10
In terms of effort, McClane's the clear champ here: he's an everyday chump trying like hell to be a hero against unstoppable odds. In terms of sheer body count and "Awww, fuck yeah!" moments, though, our New York cop falls a bit behind.