After two figures from First Blood, the more iconic Rambo from Rambo: First Blood part II that everybody and their brother wanted has finally been released, and the world is rejoicing. This is Rambo as killing machine, cementing him as one of the biggest action movie icons of the ’80s. Where the first movie was a subtler exploration of a man scarred by war, Rambo II elevates Rambo to the personification of war itself.
NECA nailed the iconic look of Rambo here, from his black pants and boots to his scarred chest and dangling headband. The face sculpt is even stronger than it was on the previous figures. I’ve seen several examples of horribly painted eyes, and though I didn’t get a chance to pick a good one in person, I got lucky enough to get a decently painted figure. They can go horribly wrong, so you might want to pick one out in person and not risk online ordering if you’re particularly finicky about such things.
Rambo features the rubber overlay on the crotch that can be divisive. I like it as it preserves a certain aesthetic integrity while not hampering the articulation. His pants are nicely sculpted with plenty of wrinkled detail. As I mentioned, he’s got some scars on his chest along with a sculpted-on necklace.
His articulation is fairly standard to what we’ve come to expect from NECA. As is usual, I’d like a little more range in his elbows and knees, but he gets into plenty of decent poses, and since he has articulation below the waist, he still beats out anything from the Terminator license, so that’s a plus. Ha! If he had a bit more clearance for squatting or holding his rifle/RPG a little easier, it would be ideal.
His ankles have a decent side-to-side and back-and-forth, which helps his stability in certain poses. His hips have a nice, large range of motion that may be surprising since they’re covered with an overlay, but it’s soft enough that it doesn’t get in the way.
The NECA skin is usually pretty good, and I have no complaints here. It’s a good, fairly realistic skin tone with highlights and shading. He looks like he’s got a decent tan.
He comes with a larger array of alternate hands than previous figures, including hands with trigger fingers, hands for holding his knife, and a special hand that seems tailor-made to hold the tiny grenade he comes with. That’s pretty cool.
For weaponry, he comes with an M60E3 machine gun, an RPG-7, and Rambo’s custom-made knife that slides into the holster on his belt. I love figures with holsters. As mentioned, he also comes with a tiny M67 grenade. I can only imagine how many of these will end up in the carpet fibers of the world, so hold on to that thing. I’ve already put mine into a little baggie, but I did the same thing with the “Pursuit of Cobra” Low Light’s tiny bullet and still spent a half hour looking for it. And that was a tenth of the size of this grenade. If I can find that, I can find anything.
Despite the various licenses, NECA has established a pretty decent scale across their lines, so Rambo looks good with figures from other lines. It would suck if he were as tall or taller than Dutch since the two actors are not even close to the same height, but they look great together, and we can finally put together the pairings we’ve wanted for a few decades.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Rambo has to team up with Robocop to kill some damn dirty apes.