RAMBO - a bloodsoaked blast from the eighties!

We've all heard it before - returning to the well several decades after you've capped off a movie series is often a recipe for disaster. People say that the new Star Wars films destroyed the trilogy for them, They couldn’t stand Indy chasing down aliens in area 51, and they mocked Stallone for dragging Rocky out of retirement one last time. I also happen to disagree with Them on all points, so I was willing to give the new Rambo some slack in the "Why are you doing this now?" department.

In the 15 years since we last left John Rambo, he has settled in Thailand catching cobras and pythons for a local reptile show. It seems that in the interim, Rambo has finally come to terms with the horrors that have lead him to this point and his place in the world.

Being a Rambo movie, this last all of 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, just across the boarder, the Burmese military is committing all kinds of atrocities against the local Karen peoples - rape, murder, pressgang drafting, slavery, and rape* are all part of their daily routines. A group of missionaries from Colorado get it into their heads to head into Burma and bring some relief to these troubled people. They enlist Rambo - after much persuasion, mind you - to take them north on his boat.

* "You said rape twice."
"I like rape."

Rambo drops off the missionaries and heads south again, washing his hands of the whole thing. Of course the missionaries are in the village a whole ten minutes when the military goons roll in and shoot the place up. The head of the mission contacts Rambo to take a mercenary team of appropriately diverse ethnicity and head back to save his flock. Needless to say, much ass kicking ensues.

I got to hand it to Stallone - this movie races along at a break neck pace. After the initial set-up, things don’t slow down a bit. By the point where any other film would be just be gearing up for the last half hour of mayhem, Rambo hits the climax and still manages to leave you spent. That's always been one of Sly's strengths, especially with Rocky - get in, deliver the package and get the hell out before you have time to go "Hey, wait a moment!"

The movie doesn’t really waste time with messy things like character development. The mercenaries are all quickly and easily identified: angry aussie, wet behind the ears greenhorn, the stoic Asian guy and so on. As soon as they were introduced, I instantly discounted the mercenaries as Red Shirts, since Rambo is a solitary creature by nature. Color me shocked then when the third act of the film was much more team-oriented than usual. Sure they had all the depth of a teaspoon, but I found myself liking them despite the stereotypes. The Missionaries were much the same way - Camcorder guy, Naive leader who means well, and the Blond female lead. She's young, she's hot and she needs help - which is enough to convince Rambo to come out of retirement. I didn’t grow as attached to them as I did the mercenaries. They never really rose above being the MacGuffin of the movie.

If our protagonists are stereotypes, the villains don’t even get that luxury. They are simple charactures, killing and raping the native until they grow bored and make games out raping and killing. The End Boss is fleshed out a little more: he wears sunglasses and likes to dip his wick with young boys now and again - and that's it. Character development, background, motivation - none of these things matter just so long as people are being vaporized by sizzling loads sent forth from the muzzle of a turret operated by John Rambo.

And whoa nelly do people die. Standing on a hill behind a 50 caliber machine gun Rambo dispenses death like Zeus on Olympus hurling lighting bolts and smiting his enemies. People don’t just get shot - They are eviscerated, they are disemboweled, they explode in a fine red mist, they get incinerated, perforated and exterminated left right and center. No - seriously. I've seen a *LOT* of bloody movies in my day, and I've not seen anything this messy, this gory, this violent, this utterly gratuitous in a very, very long time. I'm actually shocked that Rambo wasn’t rated X.

Oh - wait, I forgot. No tits! Thanks MPAA for defending the moral center of the country and protecting us once again!

As you may have gathered, the plot is pretty paper thin - although you can't fault Stallone for not including a thoughtful effort to raise awareness of the atrocities going on inside Burma. It's not quite the insightful dissertation on the horrors of war and it's effect on man like First Blood was, but there is some social commentary going on here too.

The other smart thing that the script does is wisely using Stallone's age to the films benefit. While Sly is still in fabulous shape (I hope I'm that well off when I hit 60), there's no denying that he is getting older and slower. Instead of covering his tracks with slick editing and discrete computer generated images, allowing Rambo to get into the thick of the action, he lets the mercenaries do all the heavy lifting and while he stays with that Big Honking Gun at the end. It's a clever move that keeps things more real that it would have been if Rambo had been going in alone and sticking his knife in every brown skinned person within arms reach.

BREASTS ON DISPLAY: 4 (strangely enough, either set are Sly's)
EXPLOSIONS: 130
ROUNDS FIRED: 959,301 (and 12 arrows)
PUNCHES THROWN: 6
HANDRAIL DEATHS: 0
CAR CHASES: 0
FRUIT CARTS DESTROYED: 0
NINJA? No
F BOMBS DROPPED: 8
BEST LINE: " You know what you are. What you're made of. War is in your blood. Don't fight it. You didn't kill for your country. You killed for yourself. God's never gonna make that go away. When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing."
BEST DEATH: Rambo shoots a guy standing in a rice paddy in the leg with an arrow, then the head, sending him cartwheeling into the air and onto a landmine, blowing wet bits of flesh all over the landscape.

THE DVD -
Looks great, sounds great! It's a widescreen anamorphic print that looks nice and clean and sharp, and the subwoofer gets a hefty workout. No complaints here.

THE EXTRAS -
We get a very meaty batch of extras with the movie. The centerpiece is the 6 part documentary that discusses everything that went into bringing Rambo back to the big screen, behind the scenes bits like music (and how it was very faithful to Jerry Goldsmith's work on the first three while still being it's Own Man), editing, and the props and weapons used. There's a bit about the release of the film and a section on the real-life situation in Burma.

We get a really excellent commentary from Stallone, who offers a lot of thoughts on the inner workings of Rambo's mind and proves to be a whole lot more complex than the film. There's a handful of mostly unnecessary deleted scenes that were deleted for good reason (save for one character building scene on the boat that I wish they kept in), the theatrical trailer and a couple of other Lionsgate trailers.

BOTTOM LINE -
It's not going to win any awards, but Rambo is an old school action movie that's a whole lot of fun. Sure it's cheesy, but Sly knows what the audience wants - ultraviolence and lots of it.

MY OTHER RAMBO REVIEWS:
* FIRST BLOOD
* RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II
* RAMBO III