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Say what you will about unnecessary sequels starring sexagenarians at the tail end of their action careers — Stallone still pretends to shoot guns as well as anyone else in show business
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Say what you will about unnecessary sequels starring sexagenarians at the tail end of their action careers — Stallone still pretends to shoot guns as well as anyone else in show business
Flick the action equivalent of an Ikea manual
Writer-director-star Sylvester Stallone’s return to portraying America’s lost son the would-be martyr that refuses to die the soldier of fortune that does it for free is unfailingly genuine. Rambo is not ashamed of itself. Rambo is not aware of itself. In an age of irony self-deprecation and referential humour Rambo plays it as straight as one of the man’s arrows lending the film an earnestness so archaic that it borders on naiveté.
Initially the viewer is treated to the first of many scenes involving the strafing bludgeoning and blowing up of swaths of huddling villagers. One might expect these scenes to be moving except that as they grow in length and enthusiasm the viewer realizes that each is merely and morbidly another one of the film’s primal adrenaline rushes. A good comparison would be a hypothetical love scene depicting an emotional bonding for the ages a truly tender moment when suddenly the audience realizes that the scene has gone over the minute-and-a-half mark and the camera continues to linger obscenely on the naked actress — in both cases emotional context has been unmasked as a backdrop for masculine excess. Stallone is not exploiting tragedy exactly but he is eschewing the “less is more” theory of filmmaking and selecting instead the “more is still not enough” style. Once the audience has been beaten about the head with visions of roving makeshift battalions of Burmese soldiers raping and murdering innocents its collective thirst for blood has been suitably aroused.
Enter the Novocain-lipped ’roid-monkey known only as John Rambo who is made to face his own justifiably nihilistic worldview by a group of misguided Christian missionaries trying to enter Burma. He drops the missionaries off across the border and barely has time to turn around before the entire village has been razed and the missionaries are tied up and crying into pig filth. He then trades missionaries for mercenaries all of whom are hired to do what Rambo was born to do — kick some makeshift military ass. After the hired guns realize just what calibre of guy they are dealing with the zeroes decide to follow the hero to the Burmese base for an epic orgiastic bloodletting. The onscreen killing reaches such nightmarish proportions that the film devolves into a statistical exercise on par with Major League Baseball.
If John Woo’s Asian-produced films could be called blood poetry and the Die Hard films blood prose then Rambo is a blood Ikea manual: a couple of pieces are missing the action depicted doesn’t look quite the same as the real thing and the English is often unintelligible. But we buy it because it is cheap as in cheap thrills. If that’s all you need it gets the job done.
