When the original Rocky hit screens in 1976, Roger Ebert suggested that Sylvester Stallone might well be “a young Marlon Brando,” recalling Brando’s slummy tough-guy roles from A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. That year, Rocky took Best Picture at the Oscars, and the then-no-name Stallone had a Best Actor nomination. Three decades later, Stallone’s critical reception has gone the way of Brando’s health—the Italian Stallion became a regular fixture at the Razzies for everything from from Rhinestone to Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.
In 2006, abandoned by the audiences that buoyed him through the ‘80s (save for supporting roles in kiddie-fare, he hadn’t starred in a blockbuster since 1996’s Daylight), Stallone began reincarnating his greatest characters in sexagenarian form. First came Rocky Balboa, the best Rocky movie since the first, both a huge surprise and a deserving hit. Now we have Rambo. Can lightning strike the same place twice?
When we last left disgruntled and disillusioned Vietnam vet John Rambo (Stallone), the dour killing machine had finished helping create the Taliban (whoops) and headed off into the Thailand sunset. Here he lives, working as a boatman and snake-catcher, until a church group asks him to ferry them north into Burma (Myanmar) to bring relief supplies to the war-wracked nation. Rambo refuses, but a blond missionary named Sarah (Julie Benz) talks him into it. The missionaries are quickly captured by the rapacious Burmese military, so Rambo and a ragtag group of soldiers (including Matthew Marsden, Graham McTavish, and Jake La Botz) must rescue them before the Burmese torture them to death.
Unlike Rocky Balboa, Rambo is well in line with its sequels. Though Rambo’s first movie, First Blood, has a reputation for violence, according to IMDB, it contains only four deaths. Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, on the other hand, kept fans counting the bodies. Anyone trying to count in Rambo will run out of fingers and toes. According to the Los Angeles Times, there are 236 deaths in Rambo, 83 by the man himself. I have no idea how they counted—with all the explosions, some had to have taken place off-screen.
Rambo is divided into two halves, a narrative structure that plays to audiences’ most slavishly base instincts. The first is designed solely to make you hate the Burmese army, who make the cops from First Blood look like Care Bears. Just in case you don’t already hate them for mass genocide of innocents, they also feed prisoners to pigs and their leader is a pedophile. In the second half, you cheer as they get their comeuppance—their very, very gory comeuppance.
In video games, the bloody bits of flesh after a particularly destructive kill are referred to as “gibs.” Rambo is not a video game, but there are gibs aplenty, bizarrely unrealistic as single bullets severing limbs and person after person, innocent and evil alike, exploding into crimson ruin. It’s like a cartoon version of the D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan, without the tragedy. Even the deaths of villagers and children is more likely to provoke awe than tears.
There is no acting here, and certainly no screenplay. Stallone scowls and mumbles unintelligibly, and no other actor even plays enough of a role to be worth mentioning; the film’s co-star is really the special effects department. Dialogue is unimaginably bad (“What do we do?” “There’s nothing we can do.” Or Rambo’s mantra: “Fuck the world.”) with almost every line invoking unintentional hilarity. The score by Bryan Tyler is at least appropriately bombastic.
One thing that I can’t grasp is how Sly Stallone could create two franchises based on such remarkably different morals. Rocky Balboa, though a boxer by trade, has always represented the triumph of the spirit over physical superiority. John Rambo, on the other hand, represents the triumph of he with the bigger gun (and the bigger arms—was there anyone surprised by Stallone’s admitted HGH use?).
And while Rambo purports to care about the awful situation in Burma, it treats all Burmese like walking sacks of blood, whichever side they’re on. First all the villagers die, then all soldiers die, and in the end the Americans are rescued. Rambo won’t sacrifice his peace for the thousands of suffering Burmese, but a cute blonde is apparently another story.
But all of this is really besides the point. If you enjoy gory action, and particularly if you have friends to hoot and holler along with you at each fresh explosion of blood, you’re probably going to like Rambo, or at least the last twenty minutes. It delivers its promise to show you a lot of people dying in a short span of time, most at the barrel of Rambo’s machine gun. This is the lowest of the lowbrow, but it doesn’t lie about what it is. Its intended audience will like it just fine.
Overall Rating: C