Rambo

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, and Matthew Marsden. Rated 18A.

As exhilaratingly adrenaline-jacked as Rambo proves to be, Sylvester Stallone doesn’t get it totally right in the resurrection of his second-most-famous alter ego. If he really wanted to give American flag wavers something to cheer for, the 61-year-old action-flick icon would have turned John Rambo loose in Iraq. Based on the thoroughly satisfying ass-kicking the perma-tortured Vietnam veteran doles out here, Rambo would have the whole mess in the Middle East cleaned up inside of a week.

Instead, after a 20-year-layoff, the one-man war machine finds himself going Columbine in Burma, where a ruthless Burmese army division amuses itself by forcing the local peasants to run through landmine-studded rice paddies. One minute Rambo—who, miraculously, hasn’t aged a day since single-handedly defeating Russia in Afghanistan—is catching snakes in the rural Thai village he calls home; the next he’s smuggling headed-for-a-world-of-shit Christian missionaries on a boat into the war zone.

Forget character development—more than ever, Rambo communicates primarily with apelike grunts and the kind of psychotic stares that terrify U.S. post-office employees. Once we’ve gotten upriver in a journey that has moments of Apocalypse Now–like poetry, this installment is all about the eye-poppingly bloody action. The outrageously gory battle sequences make this the first Rambo flick that doesn’t play out like a real-life cartoon. Forget sanitizing things: arms, legs, heads, and various other appendages are blown off in gut-splattered Technicolor. Recognizing that most kids today are too busy playing Call of Duty on the PlayStation to give a shit about what’s screening at the local multiplex, Stallone—who also directs—wisely keeps things moving along with the thrill-a-second intensity of a shoot-to-kill video game. When the machine-gun smoke clears, you find yourself hoping that Rambo doesn’t wait another 20 years to make his next appearance. After all, there’s a war in Iraq just waiting for someone to sort shit out.

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