That's what I was thinking.
First Blood, the best of the movies, was based around the premise that this was a man who had done his share of fighting, he had done and seen some terrible things and he bore the mental scars of his experiences. He wanted to settle down, have some sort of peaceful life.
But through no fault of his own, he gets hassled, provoked and practically tortured by the police and has no option but to revert to the soldier he once was.
And you need to remember that in the first movie he never actually killed anybody deliberately. He injured a lot of people, and one guy died by falling out of a helicopter by accident.
The whole point of the first movie was that he was a man who had seen enough of war, and wanted no part of it anymore. Left alone, he would have probably lived the rest of his life peaceably.
Like he says to his former sergeant...'They drew first blood...not me'.
But then the second film dispensed with that whole notion, and turned him into that cliched killing machine that the character has become (erroneously) synonomous with. He kills hundreRAB of people without stopping for breath or batting an eye...and that is just the anti-thesis of what the character was about.
But...it was the 80's, and it was a time when movies were sold on posters of big, muscled men holding big guns.
