- Awesome Music: The last of the Rambo movies to have Jerry Goldsmith as composer and a great score to go out with at the time. I’ll Stay
in particular makes for the ultimate coda to his Rambo scores. "I'll Stay" was intended to be the end credits music but was supplanted by a Giorgio Moroder-produced Bill Medley Cover Version of "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother", perhaps in hopes of a Breakaway Pop Hit.. - Common Knowledge: The film's dedication has always been "This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan." It was not changed from "This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" after 9/11, as is sometimes claimed. Contemporary reviews such as this one show that it was always dedicated to the Afghan people as a whole.
- Complete Monster: Colonel Alexei Zaysen is a Soviet military officer who is determined to see through the genocidal campaign against Afghanistan. Zaysen has headed up a variety of war crimes, including the mass rape and slaughter of pregnant women; disguising mines as toys so children will be blown up; and regularly seeking villages to massacre the occupants. Running a heinous extermination camp, Zaysen regularly tortures Afghanistan citizens to death through electricity, fire, and beatings just for fun, and when he captures Col. Samuel "Sam" Trautman, he subjects the man to these same torments. When Rambo tries to save Trautman and help the Afghan rebellion, Zaysen gleefully leads a helicopter squad to kill hundreds of men, women, and even babies.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- The Soviets began withdrawing from Afghanistan ten days before the film's premiere. And the withdraw of the Soviets did not improve the situation in Afghanistan one bit, with the collapse of the Soviet-backed government in 1992 and rival Mujahideen turning against each other, all resulting in a costly civil war that led to the Taliban taking power in 1996.
- One terrorist attack later and the glorification of America's intervention in Afghanistan took a turn for the worse. While not all Mujahideen fighters became part of the Taliban (many joined the US-backed Northern Alliance), the black-and-white depiction of the Afghan conflict did not age well. The Taliban offensive and subsequent fall of the US-backed government in 2021 didn't help either.
- Colonal Trautman refers to Afghanistan as Vietnam for the Soviets. While this became true (the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan shortly before the film's release, a contributing factor leading to the collapse of the USSR a few years later), it also became prophetic in 2021, with the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban quickly overran the US-backed government in 3 months, while the US's international standing suffered a large blow. Images of US personnel evacuating from the Kabul embassy in a helicopter brought comparisons with the similarly chaotic withdrawal from Saigon in 1975.
- Memetic Mutation:
- "Who are you?" "Your worst nightmare." became quite memetic for a while.
- Rambo's "Fuck 'em!" line when facing down the Soviet army at the end is very well-known.
- "This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" became quite a meme, both in the sense of how badly the film aged and putting in other unrelated movies for snark. As noted above, however, it's actually an urban legend; the final dedication is actually to "the gallant people of Afghanistan" as a whole as opposed to the Mujahideen specifically.
- Similarly, there have been bumper stickers with Osama bin Laden's face stating "Rambo and I support the mujahideen resistance".
- In France, "dans ton cul!" ("in your ass!")note has become a stock troll answer to a question asking "where is X?".
- Moral Event Horizon: Zaysen most likely crossed it with the Afghanistan village massacre. What's worse is that it's implied he does this on a regular basis.
- Narm: It's hard not to laugh when Rambo rams his tank into the Big Bad's helicopter in the finale because of Stallone's trademark idiotic battle cry.
- Signature Scene: Rambo cauterizing his bullet wound with gunpowder is one of the best remembered scenes of the series.
- So Okay, It's Average: General consensus is that it’s a fine action film overall, but nowhere near as powerful as the first or as engaging as the second. Doesn’t help that it came out in the late 80's, a time where these types of big action movies and their clichés were everywhere and played out at this point.
- Special Effects Failure: Some mild ones during the scene where Rambo bonds with the local Afghans.
- During the "sheep-ball" game between Rambo and a few of the locals, the carcass of the sheep being used as a ball alternates between a real one and an obvious-looking rubber prop.
- Later on when Zaysen leads a helicopter attack on the village, a brief scene where a woman holding a baby gets gunned down has an obvious-looking doll in place of said baby.
- Unintentional Period Piece: The film was criticized for being dated right as it hit theatres. The anticommunism goes up to eleven in a time when the Cold War was actually thawing, and worst of all, the Soviet Union acknowledged defeat and began to withdraw from Afghanistan ten days before the movie's release. This is before one even considers the impression of Afghanistan that many Westerners have formed since The War on Terror, when those previously considered "freedom fighters" were increasingly regarded as or conceptually associated with "terrorists."
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