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Rambo

Review By: Brian DePasquale
BrianDePasquale @TheCinemaSource.com

“You’re not going to change anything,” says John Rambo to a group of Christian aids looking to improve the well being of villagers in the midst of Burmese genocide. This message of skepticism echoes throughout the entire first act of Sylvester Stallone’s latest action exercise and provides the film with a template that remains shamelessly half-baked in its ideological focus from beginning to end. Rambo circulates around a downpour of topical issues of vast complexity but operates with a social subtext as deep as the small puddles they form. The movie is too preachy and simple-minded to be taken seriously, too focused on body counts and ruthless violence to be taken lightly. It is mean spirited and unimaginative with its action sequences. It is pretty to look at from an aesthetic point of view, but painful to watch from any other.

After the joyful revival of another franchise with last year’s Rocky Balboa, the angry tone comes as quite a surprise. Stallone returns to Southeast Asia with a nasty chip on his shoulder. The former film reminds us of some of the joys of well-established formula. When done correctly, conventions can trick us into thinking they are unconventional. When done poorly, however, they feel like a game of connect-the-dots. Rambo appears like a hollow skeleton draped with recycled rags from better films.

Perhaps my standards for narrative efficiency were set too high going into the film. Great action films do not always have to have an elaborate structure and the prospects of character development are almost always put on the back burner in exchange for flashy bells and whistles. But Rambo does not give me much to work with in the fundamental areas of its composition. The photography by Glenn MacPherson is inspired, but the makeup of the world it inhabits is decidedly dull.

The film is largely made up of sequences in which Rambo keeps quiet until some ill-tempered fool forces him to drop a dramatic line that is supposed to resonate with the audience. These lines are the message of the film. They are the hyper-conservative messages of a man who continues to fight the Vietnam War long after the American presence has ended. He offers us some pretty astounding poetry along the way. Such phrases as “Live for nothing, or die for something” and “ When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing” offer us startlingly flat verbiage that feels awfully similar to the kind of rah-rah patriotism emoted by “These Colors Don’t Run” bumper stickers.

“Fuck the world,” he tells us at one point. Indeed, he does do some serious world fucking. I am informed by the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) that the film’s body count is 236 and that, on average, 2.59 ...