Lieutenant Colonel Sergei T. Podovsky (Russian: Сергей Т. Подовский, Sergey T. Podovskiy; simply known as Lieutenant Colonel Podovsky or Sergei T. Podovsky) is the main antagonist in the 1985 film Rambo: First Blood Part II. He is a ruthless Soviet commander who serves as the head of a Vietnamese POW camp where John Rambo was captured and tortured during the Vietnam War.
He was portrayed by Steven Berkoff.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close to Being Pure Evil?[]
- During the Vietnam War, Podovsky was in charge of a prisoner of war camp where POWs were tortured and kept in horrible conditions, including John Rambo himself, making Podovsky at least partially at fault for Rambo having PTSD in the first movie, and he still runs the camp in the present, some other of the worst things that happen include using them for slave labor, and sometimes having POWs crucified, as seen with at least one POW named Banks. While there is no indication that Podovsky consistently plays an active in the horrible things that happen there, he still at the very least, willingly allows them to occur.
- In the present, Podovsky first appears to interrogate Rambo after the latter was caught on a mission to find POWs, and attempting to rescue one of them, where he has his right-hand Sergeant Yushin torture Rambo, and also uses electricity and his cigar to torture him, and he also claims that Rambo was faring "much better than the others", suggesting Rambo isn't the first person who Podovsky has personally had tortured.
- When Rambo refuses to cow in to Podovsky's demands, Podovsky threatens to cut Banks' eye out with a scalding hot knife.
- After Rambo escapes with the help of Co Bao, Podovsky sends his men out into the jungle to find and kill them, resulting in the latter being killed at the hands of Lieutenant Tay, thus making Podovsky responsible for her death.
- One of his men shoots an unarmed POW in the back while he tries to get into Rambo's helicopter.
- After Rambo kills most of Podovsky's subordinates and rescues the POWs, Podovsky pilots a helicopter and attempts to personally kill Rambo and the POWs, endangering countless civilians in the process, except Podovsky is killed by Rambo instead.
- When he first meets Rambo, he claims to detest torture, and tries to get Rambo to sympathize with him, but these are just tactics to get Rambo to talk, and if he believes them, then that just makes him a hypocrite since he still allows POWs to get tortured, or even outright orders it as shown with Rambo, and he even outright calls POWs war criminals.
- There is no indication that he cares about his men, be they Sergeant Yushin or anyone else, and is never shown to be particularly sad about there deaths.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
- He fails the Heinous Standards to the sequel villain Colonel Alexei Zaysen, since Zaysen does worse with a much higher confirmed kill count, including children (Also to Tint and the Martinez brothers, though a bit less comparable since they were decades later). However he is easily the most heinous character in the second movie in particular as Captain Vinh, Lieutenant Tay, and Sergeant Yushin are all his subordinates who do what he tells them, or at the very least, are enabled by him in someway or another. There is also of course Marshall Murdock, the next biggest villain of the movie, who knows there are POWs and tries to bury the evidence, and leaves Rambo to be tortured by the Soviets and Vietnamese in the first place, but he is far less active and direct about it than Podovsky. He also passes the general standard too with his torturing POWs, threatening to cut a man's eye out with a scalding hot knife, and having Co Bao killed. He also has something of a personal animosity with Rambo since he indirectly tortured him in the Vietnam war thus giving him PTSD in the process, and also orders his love interest killed, so it is not too severe of a prevention.