Rambo Review

I saw Rocky Balboa last year and was pleasantly surprised by what Sylvester Stallone delivered. Stallone crafted a film that was more about aging and wanting to be a part of the limelight again than it was about a boxing match. Critics and audiences lauded the film, resulting in an unforeseen success for Stallone. In turn, Stallone and Lions Gate Film decided that it would be a good idea to roll out Rambo, hoping to catch the same lightning in a bottle.

While it lacks the heart that Rocky Balboa possessed, Rambo certainly makes up for it with its brutality.

Stallone returns in the titular role, but a much older and wiser mercenary. Rambo has now secluded himself in the Myanmar countryside (NOTE: Stallone does not seem to realize that the country is now called Myanmar and not Burma anymore), where he handles poisonous snakes and shuttles people up and down the river with his longboat.

A group of missionaries comes to Rambo’s paradise and asks him to transport them “upriver.” Initially reluctant, Rambo does move them up the river so they may offer relief to survivors of a sixty-year-old civil war. However, two weeks pass when another man comes to Rambo and informs him that the missionaries have been taken hostage.

In turn, Rambo strikes back into action for what Stallone calls “Beyond Rangoon, but with rocket launchers.”

The exposition of the Rambo going through his daily routine and the missionaries seeking him out takes a plodding forty minutes. Once the action does get going though it is relentless in both its pace and demeanor.

Gang rapes, decapitations, bludgeonings, machine gunnings, machetings, cross bowings, neck snappings, and blow uppings all occur in the last hour of the film that would make Quentin Tarantino say, “Wow, that’s violent.” One analyst counted 220+ deaths in that film hour – which equivocates to 2.59 deaths per minute in the movie.

This violence does work though because it does show how jaded Rambo is. It does question the morality of its violence, even if it is in a fuzzy, illogical, schmaltzy manner.

All-in-all, it is nice to have an old fashioned action film that does not truly want to delve too much into the character’s psyche. In the end, Rambo is just more concerned with blowing things up and showing a spectacular fireball.

However, that really is a good thing.

When to See It: On DVD