Review: Rambo

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Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Graham McTavish, Matthew Marsden. Screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Art Monterastelli. Directed by Sylvester Stallone. Rated R. 93 minutes. Lionsgate.

John Rambo is back with a bloody vengeance in Rambo, written and directed by Sylvester Stallone, returning to the character that made him an action hero in the 80s and with good reason. While 1985’s First Blood was a modest and well-made thriller about a disenfranchised, Vietnam vet going mano-a-mano with a sadistic small-town sheriff, 1982’s Rambo: First Blood Part II sent him back to the jungles of Vietnam on a POW rescue mission. 1988’s Rambo III found him on yet another rescue, this time in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

Blatantly violent yet ingeniously entertaining B-movies, they were cultural touch points at a time when audiences couldn’t get enough of action heroes like Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Norris smoking out one-dimensional, evil enemies, however un-PC it may have been, to save innocent and none-too-bright Americans under fire. And they worked, firmly positioned as gung-ho actioneers made with speed, blood, exotic locales and superhuman mercenaries unleashing hell in a hail of hand-to-hand combat and heavy artillery. Ah, the 80s. When you’re nostalgic for John Rambo, something has definitely gone wrong in contemporary American action movies.

Rambo, the fourth film in the series, finds the reclusive character living a quiet life in rural Thailand, getting by selling poisonous snakes to market until a group of naïve Christian missionaries contract him for a boat ride into the heart of the Burmese conflict, rife with violence and torture, which Stallone mounts with ferocity early in the picture in order to rationalize his final reel spree.

The missionaries, led by fearless Sarah (Julie Benz) and naïve Michael (Paul Schulze), ignore Rambo’s warnings even after witnessing death en route. It’s all an excuse really to have them kidnapped by about a hundred soldiers, imprisoned, starved and pelted with rain in the kind of hanging cages, dirt grottos and thatch huts required by these films, while vicious central casting soldiers, brandishing guns and knives, scream loudly in foreign tongues until we get the point that our righteous do-gooders are in real trouble.

Returning for a secret infiltration and rescue (what else?), Rambo transports a group of obnoxious mercenaries, including condescending Lewis (Graham McTavish, over-blustering every line), youthful School Boy (Matthew Marsden) and a half-dozen or so other generic warmongers whose function is basically to end up on a river bank for execution, giving Rambo the opportunity to do what he does best. And he does.

The film is old-fashioned, and I mean that as a compliment, from the bleached-out cinematography, up-the-river bickering, simplified politics and Rambo himself single-handedly annihilating an entire army—with bullets that explode torsos and decapitate heads and arrows shredding limbs and mutilating bodies in all directions. In the film’s final sequences, it becomes an orgiastic frenzy, a machine gun firestorm and buckets of blood raining down over the tropical setting. The film is appropriately, hideously violent.

But it does have its charms in its stoic, bent anti-hero, squarely appealing formula and inability to give us one sympathetic Burmese character. The technical side of the film is capable, with but one moment of CGI trickery and a pretty solid grasp on its jungle cinematography and action, and an excellent sound design when the film’s final battle unfolds. The editing doesn’t work at all until the climax, and many of the film’s non-action scenes contain multiple, awkward dissolves that destroy any sense of rhythm or shape in the scenes.

But there is something else severely lacking here—any relevant political subtext or depth. Rambo distances us from its hero more than any other film in the series. In fact, he barely speaks more than a few sentences in the entire film. Combine this withdrawl with a Burmese conflict that feels irrelevant to the times, thin characters and no political weight to his actions as we felt in the previous films, and you have a bloodbath for the sake of a bloodbath. Nothing more or less. Perhaps if the film had sent him to the Middle East and woven in our current political crises of confidence and conscience, which Stallone did well prior, then Rambo may have really been on his game and we would have reason to care about any of this.

Other than the retrofitted kick of seeing game, fit Stallone as Rambo once more—this time keeping his shirt on—the film disappoints when the credits roll at a trim 79 minutes (though the film’s official running time is listed at 93). Rambo is little more than an excuse to get him up on a jungle platform where he can disembowel an entire army with a high-powered machine gun, instead of his hands. At least in the prior films, he had a moral compass as well as a mission.

This time, we don’t care about who he is rescuing. We don’t care about who he is killing. We don’t care about him. Yet the film, is undeniably exciting in its final sequence because of the sheer over-the-top carnage, which would fit fine in anything directed by 70s schlock masters Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi, who knew their jungles and jugulars as Stallone does here.

But Sly, who won his Oscar early then parlayed his 70s movie success into 80s action and beef, eschewing the drama that got him the gold in the first place—can do better than a Rambo, with a gun, but without a cause.

-Lee Shoquist