Photo by: courtesey of Lionsgate Entertainment
It’s been 20 years since the last Rambo movie hit the box office. Some might say there are good reasons for that.
Since Hollywood has abruptly decided that every big license from the 1980s should be revitalized and squeezed for every nostalgic penny they are worth, we get “Rambo,” the latest installment written, directed, and starred in by Sylvester Stallone.
The story picks up where the last movie left off with John Rambo as a Vietnam vet living in Southeast Asia. For the first 10 minutes, the audience is subjected to some of the clumsiest exposition in recent film history.
We see Rambo wandering about Thailand, where he is apparently making a living by fishing, blacksmithing, and wrangling snakes. It does not take long before a group of missionaries ask him politely if they can rent the services of his boat to go into Burma.
Rambo’s response is less than helpful, as he tells the church-going fellow that he is not going to make a difference. The annoyingly persistent church guy is ready to give up, but his girlfriend has a better idea.
She goes to Rambo in the middle of the night and yells at him for being a terrible person. Somehow this works and Rambo agrees to take the church group into Burma.
In a shocking twist, the church group is captured in one of the most spectacular scenes of brutal violence one is likely to ever see in film. The effects are amazing, but that is just as much a weakness as it is a selling point. Thrilling violent effects are one thing, but in scenes involving children being murdered and sexually assaulted, it crosses the line to disturbing.
This may have been Stallone’s attempt to make the audience really, really hate the antagonists, in this case various nefarious members of the Burmese army.
To his credit, it works, and that makes their unnecessarily gruesome deaths at the hands of Rambo all the more satisfying.
Regardless, the rest of the movie concerns itself with Rambo and a group of mercenaries attempting to rescue the church group from the clutches of the Burmese army.
The best dialogue in the movie comes from a bald British mercenary who yells and complains constantly for absolutely no reason.
However, “Rambo” actually does pretty well for itself, as far as action movies go.
Once you get past the first 20 minutes of dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone who has only just recently reached the sixth grade reading level, the movie runs pretty smoothly.
Rambo runs in circles, being generally violent in gruesome and occasionally hilarious ways.
The film is extremely gory, so those averse to such blood spatters and flying bits of viscera should steer clear of it.
Overall, “Rambo” proves itself as a pretty decent action flick. Yet, it failed to beat “Cloverfield” at the box office for a reason.
Perhaps Stallone should quit while he is still a little bit a head.
