Co-writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone follows the unexpectedly triumphant 2007 swansong to his other movie icon, ROCKY BALBOA with a fourth RAMBO outing, made two decades after the poorly received RAMBO III. We’re now in a deeply jaded new century and what we’ve seen in just a few years makes those earlier RAMBO flicks look even more like gung-ho comic book fantasies than they did at the time. We’ve all watched 3000 people die for real live on TV, complete with explosions and collapsing buildings. We’ve seen people beheaded on the internet and documentaries with genuine suicides. Mainstream Hollywood horror movies have depicted all manner of graphic tortures perpetrated on screaming victims. The simply titled RAMBO is Stallone’s response.
Enjoy the pangs of nostalgia provoked by John Rambo’s first appearance and by the touching incorporation of the late Jerry Goldsmith’s reflective FIRST BLOOD theme into Brian Tyler’s muscular new score. For this RAMBO, which opens with a montage of real-life Burma atrocities, doesn’t give us much to cheer about on a conventional action movie level. It’s a downbeat, relentlessly visceral movie for a world gone horribly wrong.
The start of RAMBO finds the title character (Stallone, pretty spry at 60-plus) living as a recluse in Thailand, his time occupied by handling snakes for local novelty acts and using his knowledge of the river to chauffeur people on his boat. A group of Colorado-based Christian missionaries persuade him to take them up river to Burma. The country has been torn apart – and then some – by almost six devastating decades of civil war. The poor Karen people are routinely brutalized and killed by the tyrannical Burmese military. Leaders of the missionaries, Julie Benz and Paul Schulze, want to help the locals but Rambo has a “fuck the world” attitude and thinks the area is beyond saving. Nonetheless, when Benz and Schulze are captured during a harrowing assault on a Burmese village, he and a band of badass mercenaries set out to rescue them.
Long term fans of the RAMBO franchise will appreciate the use of 80’s style montages, the fleeting flashbacks to earlier films, the relishably simplistic 80’s style action movie dialogue (“Live for nothing or die for something”/”When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing”) and a full-circle final scene that ends the film on a heartfelt, low key homecoming. [The late Richard Crenna, a prominent player in all three preceding films as Col Trautman, is much missed]
Stallone no longer takes his shirt off in the interest of good taste and a concession to his advancing years results in bumped-up roles for the mercenaries in the action set pieces, but, detractors be damned, he’s still a commanding presence and he can still out-run Earth-shaking explosions with the best of ‘em. It’s a film of action, not acting, but Benz does good work in an inevitably thankless role (she’s the first woman in a Rambo film to be remotely memorable) and Graham McTavish provides the few moments of humor as a leery British bastard who seals his fate by referring to one of his captors as a “lady-boy cunt”.
This flick, unsurprisingly, is very unsubtle, and even in questionable taste, in its outraged stance about the State of The World and its exploitation of the same for genre thrills. It has offended some, just like the earlier flicks did in their day, but its intentions are sincere enough and anyone who goes along to a RAMBO flick expecting subtlety is clearly not the kind of person you’d ever want to go to a movie with. Inarguably, this is, by some margin, the best film in the franchise since FIRST BLOOD.
Whatever you feel about the film’s use of a real life political situation, there’s no denying that it more than delivers when it comes to pyrotechnics and violence. Technically excellent, it really sparks into life during the startling set pieces, which showcase some of the most unpleasant and intense graphic mayhem ever seen in a mainstream R rated genre flick. Evidently influenced by the handheld in-your-face gore of Savin Private Ryan’s opening battle, Stallone delivers a village holocaust that’s closer in tone and content to the harshest scenes of SOLDIER BLUE than any of the earlier RAMBO films. A three figure body count is spectacularly achieved : heads explode with the splashy (CG enhanced) gusto of a Romero movie; children are graphically slaughtered; arrows rip through faces; bodies are routinely blown apart; limbs are hacked off with machetes; and Rambo tears a guy’s throat out with his bare hands.
None of this jaw-droopingly vivid carnage feels cartoonish like the more outlandish moments of previous RAMBOs, and a lot of it packs a dynamic punch unlike anything Stallone has previously done. Moral issues aside, the movie is never dull and often shocking.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
