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Rambo

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

I'm actually terribly unfamiliar with most of Sylvester Stallone's filmography. The first Rocky movie I saw was Rocky Balboa. In fact, looking through all his films on IMDb, I can attest to only seeing Judge Dredd and Tango & Cash. And, one afternoon when I was about nine, I caught about a half hour of one of the Rambo movies on TV.

I have no idea which one it was, but I remember being a bit amazed by the simplicity of it. There was Stallone, with long hair, wearing ammo like a shirt, gunning down dozens of nameless bad guys in what looked like an ancient cave. He was the prototypical action hero, and since I only saw a half hour and had no idea whatsoever of the context or plot, it took on an almost mythic quality for me - the purest action movie I've ever seen.

Yes, I'm being quite overly dramatic, but a character like Rambo demands that sort of thing. I mean, his name's Rambo, for heaven's sake. The new movie, called simply Rambo - apparently they forgot that that's technically what the second Rambo movie was called - feels like a throwback to the '80s era that produced the first three, and I mean that in a good way.

It's been the better part of twenty years since the last installment, and now Vietnam vet John Rambo spends his days fishing in Thailand. Just up the Salween River lies Burma - a virtual warzone thanks to a genocidal government. When a group of missionaries from Colorado show up and ask Rambo to sail them upshore to help the Burmese villagers, he reluctantly does so - but then the village is attacked, the missionaries are kidnapped, and Rambo, along with a group of mercenaries, has to go up and do what he does best.

That's all there is to it. The set-up takes a bit too long - especially since Stallone, who co-wrote the script, has a tendency to make everyone's lines sound like mini-speeches. But the film delivers, especially in the hard R-rated violence that action fans are craving from this.

The attack on the peaceful village by the evil government is both realisitic and brutally violent - and since atrocities like it are actually happening in Burma today, it's a hard scene to watch. But the entertainment value of Rambo lies in presenting us with scenes like that, and then letting Rambo jump in and start kicking the tar out of those very real bad guys - and shooting them, and stabbing them, and everything else you can think of. If next year we're given Rambo V: Rambo Beats Up Bin Laden, I'm totally there.

Yes, the film appeals to our most basic blood lust, and while that's troubling in the sense that the movie suggests violence is a better solution than non-violence, ...