One version of Rambo 4 saw Sylvester Stallone's title solder go up against the original movie's villain Sheriff Teasle. First Blood was based on the novel of the same name by David Morrell, which saw ex-Vietnam vet John Rambo launch his own private war on a small town. The movie version spent years in development hell, with actors like Steve McQueen considered for the role. Stallone eventually landed the part, with its huge success giving him a hit film outside of the Rocky series.
Stallone would return for four sequels of varying quality, with the most recent being 2019's Last Blood. There was a noticeable gap between 1988's Rambo III and 2008's eventual fourth movie Rambo, but various concepts were thrown about in those intervening years. Unused sequel concepts included Rambo having to rescue the President from a terrorist takeover of Camp David, or an adaptation of the novel Homefront but swapping out the main character with Rambo.
The eventual Rambo 4 saw Stallone's soldier heading into Burma on a brutal rescue mission, but yet another version, titled Rambo: Borderline by writer Dan Gordon (via Screenplay Archology), took a very different route. This version saw Rambo living as a recluse in Arizona, who reluctantly agrees to head to Mexico to look into the disappearance of his maid's missing granddaughter, who was trying to cross the border. Rambo heads to Mexico and discovers the girl was kidnapped by sex traffickers, and he's horrified to learn the man in charge - dubbed "The Judge" - is none other than Will Teasle, the sheriff who became his nemesis in First Blood.
Teasle was played by Brian Dennehy, and while not an out-and-out bad guy, he is depicted as a cruel bully whose needless mistreatment of Rambo is what led to the latter's rampage. The original movie ended with Rambo sparring the sheriff's life after a violent showdown, but Rambo: Borderline's screenplay revealed he ended up in Mexico and became a vicious crime boss. This makes Rambo's war in this version especially personal, as he feels responsible for all the chaos and trauma Teasle has wrought in the years since he sparred him.
This Rambo 4 screenplay saw the title character infiltrate Teasle's compound in the finale after rescuing his maid's daughter, and taking out Teasle's henchmen with a combination of explosive arrows and other violent methods. The final showdown would see Teasle wound Rambo before they engage in a nasty fight, ending with Rambo strangling the villain with barb wire. Some of the Rambo movies struggled with memorable villains, so in a sense bringing back the titular character's most famous foe was a good call.
That said, this Rambo 4's interpretation of Teasle feels like a major leap from the character shown in First Blood, and the script doesn't flesh out how he became such a monster. In the end, Stallone opted not to use this script since he didn't feel like Rambo would be ready to go back to America, but much of Borderline's story was later reused for Rambo: Last Blood.
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