Rambo Movie Reviews
January 26, 2008 — orthai25
Distributor: LIONSGATE
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With the possible exception of John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone has been granted more second chances than any other movie star in Hollywood. The writer/director/actor/walking pop-culture punchline kicked off his sixth or seventh career comeback a year ago with Rocky Balboa, which became the underdog hit of the 2006 holiday season. Stallone used that film’s $70 purse to revisit another one of his iconic characters, John Rambo, the indestructible Vietnam vet who, to date, has waged a one-man war against the Washington state police force, the Vietnamese army and the entire Soviet empire. Apparently, moviegoers are ecstatic to see the guy back in action; the fourth film in the series, simply titled Rambo, opened to $18 million this weekend. Since mining his past has proven so lucrative for the aging action star, it shouldn’t be long until we see such sequels as Over the Top 2: I Declare a Thumb War, Rhinestone 2: The Metal Years and Stop! Or My Moms Be Shootin’ Yo Ass, featuring the long-awaited team up of Stallone and Flavor Flav.Set two decades after Rambo III, which found our hero fighting alongside the Mujahideen to drive the Russkies out of Afghanistan (hey, can Charlie Wilson confirm that?), the new film relocates the now-sixtysomething Rambo to the jungles of Thailand, where he ekes out a living hunting snakes for a local tourist trap. He also earns a few bucks transporting folks upriver to stations below the Burmese border. (For whatever reason, the film never refers to Burma by its official name, Myanmar. Perhaps budget constraints prevented Stallone from purchasing a current map of Southeast Asia.) But when he’s approached by a group of American missionaries to take them into Burma so that they can bring much-needed supplies to the persecuted Karen tribe, the retired warrior refuses. It takes a nonsensical conversation with a pretty blonde missionary named Sarah (Julie Benz) to change his mind. As it turns out, they probably should have taken no for answer; not long after arriving at the Karen people’s village, the missionaries are captured by the Burmese army, which according to the film consists entirely of nameless psychopaths, rapists, baby-killers and closeted homosexuals. Rambo is hired by their church’s pastor to escort a crew of mercenaries back across the border on a rescue mission. Naturally, this reawakened killing machine ends up leading the operation and reduces Burma’s population by about half in the process.Although Stallone regularly insists that Rambo is an apolitical figure, anyone who has ever seen one of these movies knows that’s a little bit like calling Michael Moore an apolitical documentarian. As originally conceived in 1982’s First Blood, John Rambo was a stand-in for the thousands of damaged Vietnam veterans who had been recruited, trained to kill and then abandoned by an uncaring military. The character underwent a major rewrite in the jingoistic 1985 sequel, morphing into a well-armed (and well-oiled) patriot who battles America’s enemies head-on while spineless bureaucrats dither and debate. And that’s essentially the version of Rambo we see in Rambo; he’s a little grumpier (the first words out of his mouth are “Fuck the world”) and a lot older, but, to borrow a line from Rocky Balboa, he’s still all about blunt-force trauma. Only the hurting bombs he drops aren’t punches—they are actual bombs, some of which have a blast radius that’s practically nuclear.Rocky Balboa was always intended to be the work of an elder statesman saying a final farewell to the character that made him famous. Stallone is up to something different with Rambo; this is his attempt to prove that he can keep up with—and even surpass—the current crop of action filmmakers. To that end, he douses the screen in blood and gore. Limbs go flying, bullets tear through flesh, heads explode like overripe tomatoes, and Rambo himself tears out one man’s throat with his bare hands and disembowels another with a hunting knife. In these moments, the movie looks more like a Hostel sequel or an early Peter Jackson horror show than a Stallone vehicle.
But the blood-soaked action sequences are the only reason to see Rambo. Whenever the guns aren’t blazing (which, thankfully, isn’t very often), there’s not much here to hold the audience’s attention. The supporting characters are nonentities, the script is perfunctory and the images are muddy and washed-out and not in a way that seems like a deliberate stylistic choice. But damned if Stallone doesn’t get us rooting for Rambo to kick bad-guy butt one more time, the same way we cheered on Rocky’s improbable return. Whatever his limitations are as an actor, there’s no one out there with a screen presence quite like Stallone’s. And maybe that’s why moviegoers and the film industry at large are always willing to give him another chance at big-screen glory. Try as we might, we just can’t let him leave the ring for good.
Critic: Ethan Alter