The American Navy are performing military manoeuvres in the Pacific, preparing themselves for the possibility of a nuclear war by using their warhead-carrying vessels. However, one of their Majors, Jack Hessalt (Arnis Licitis) has been contacted by a shady group before he boards the ship, and they have capitalised on his post-traumatic stress disorder spawned by a tour of Vietnam during the war there to push him to be more malleable to their specific interests. Could it be that he could be manipulated out on the ocean to commandeer one of the warships and use the nuclear missiles against the Soviet Union, thereby kicking off the Third World War?
Perish the thought, yet while American cinema was churning out action flicks by the ton all on the subject of how the Russkies could be taken down by the right mixture of mavericks, gun-toting, military-trained mercenaries and/or a well-orchestrated American attack when the Yanks had been pushed just so far themselves and goddammit were not going to take it anymore, the Soviets were curiously reticent to provide a cinematic counterpart. They were subjecting their citizens to movies celebrating another, earlier conflict, the Second World War, where they had triumphed against the Nazis and were rightfully proud of that achievement. But the Cold War? Nyet.
However, in the nineteen-eighties one little item was brave enough to tackle what the authorities in the U.S.S.R. were reluctant to discuss with their public, the threat of global thermonuclear war, which in the West had become an obsession in movies, television, books and even the pop charts. This was Odinochnoye plavanye, translated variously as Solo Voyage: The Revenge, The Detached Mission or simply The Russian Rambo, as it was more or less the sole example of their nation attempting to beat the Americans at their own game. That it did not exactly set the world's box offices alight was telling as to how far they succeeded, and ever since this has been a curio not many took a chance on.
Watching it, you can see why, as its reputation was more interesting than the reality, with the first two thirds taken up with a lot of talk between characters who may or may not be important to the eventual bursts of action that constituted the last half hour. Hessalt (who may or may not be called that as a pun on "asshole") is plainly not a well man, and he keeps edging towards potentially mass destructive madness with every scene, Nam flashbacks made up of Vietnamese civilians being abused by G.I.s in black and white news footage. So if he was not our Rambo, who was? Technically, this could have been sending up the concept of the violent Vietnam War vet as hero, but then again there was the crack Russian squad of soldiers who wind up on a nearby island - and US Army base.
