CinePhillyist Reviews... Rambo

I’m not going to bore you with the background information on the character John Rambo or the storylines of the previous films in the Rambo quadrant, because, honestly, if you don’t already know them by heart, there is no reason in hell why you should be going to see this movie. So I will concentrate solely on this film, and if I can’t sum up the plot in seven sentences, I will retire from writing: Rambo is living in some Southeast Asian hellhole outside the war zone of Burma, paying the bills as a snake wrangler. Some namby-pamby, white-bread relief workers (led by Julie Benz of Dexter) ask him to take them into Burma on his boat. He takes them up there, and like five seconds later they get kidnapped by some evil Burmese military regime. Rambo joins a group of mercenaries to go in there and rescue the moronically delusional do-goodies. He rescues them and they are pursued by the bad guys. Rambo shoots and stabs the hell out of all the bad guys, and the religious group heads back to Colorado where they will surely vote for Mike Huckabee in the 2008 Presidential election. Oh wait, I forgot about how the movie starts off with archival footage from the very genuine conflict in the real-life country of Burma. You know, because no better way to provide context for your pointlessly gratuitous gorefest than to show photos of real-life citizens with their heads and arms chopped off.

In a way, you have to respect Stallone for the economy of the whole ordeal. There is no discussion of bureaucratic red tape. No explanation of why the Burmese conflict is even going on. It’s just five minutes of white folks whining about “people who need help” and then on with the blood-letting. When the whiteys get kidnapped and some anonymous reverend dude wants to get them out, there is no negotiating with the United Nations, no urgent calls to the White House. Eh-eh. The guy just pops up at Rambo’s shack in the middle of nowhere. How’d he get there? Who cares? If you want to know how that stuff works, watch Rendition, because this movie is not aiming to be that boring.

You know that hackneyed old saying about how everything old becomes new again? Well, count this 90-minute bloodbath as a shining example. This is 80s-retro at its finest, a reminder of the days when it wasn’t totally inexplicable to think that one dude could go into the jungle and obliterate 1,000 guys carrying high-tech assault weapons. This is a pressing of the rewind button back to the times when all you needed to do to assign the tag “villain” to a character was have him speak in an Asian accent REALLY LOUDLY!!! But I’ll tell you one thing that they didn’t have in the 80’s: C.G.I.

And oh boy, does Stallone play with the toys. You have not lived until you’ve seen a bad guy blown away at point-blank range by one of those huge machine guns that you stand on. Whole truck loads of soldiers are eviscerated in the time it takes one of those Listerine breath strips to dissolve in your mouth. When Rambo happens upon a guy getting ready to rape the nice white lady he has taken a shining to, he doesn’t do one of those neck-breaking thingies that you see happen all the time in these sorts of action flicks. Nah. He grinds his nails into the guy’s throat and rips his esophagus out all in a straight-on, extended close-up that would make Jonathan Demme beam with pride.

You thought I was done? No, because like this film, I will not have done my job until you discharge the meal you have just eaten. Arms and legs are chopped off so frequently it makes the opening of Saving Private Ryan look like an episode of Touched by an Angel. There are so many close-ups of heads exploding, you will think you accidentally ventured into some sort of twisted Gallagher concert. And finally, the coup de gracelessness comes in the form of the head baddie trying to escape only to catch a Rambo dagger right in the abdomen. Only it isn’t enough to just stab some dude directly in the mid-section. Rambo slits the dude from belly button to back bone, and director Stallone captures the quickly emerging blood-and-guts in another extreme close-up that would make Sam Peckinpah scream for Mommy.

Now I could sit here and trash this. I could act very stuffy and talk about how offended John Ford and Jean Renoir would be to see the cinema used in this manner. I could rag on the witless dialogue crafted by Stallone and some guy who probably worked previously as Stallone's pool boy. I could wax poetically about the sheer inexplicability of Rambo finding an old-ass bomb in the middle of the jungle, getting his MacGyver on, and turning it into a large-scale explosive using some string and a piece of cloth. Hell, it would be easy to make fun of the aging Stallone and the fast-motion camera technique he employs to make his Rambo look like he isn’t a 60-year-old codger. I could say that it looked like the movies Thomas Edison used to make only if his characters ran around with Uzis and portable rocket launchers instead of fancy frocks and preening parasols. But that would be too easy.

The bottom line is this is what the people came to see. At the screening I attended, people were clapping their asses off. And laughing too. And let’s not be hypocritical about this. We didn’t have the stones to rise up against a President who sent our troops off to get blown to bits for no apparent reason, so I’m not going to get all uppity about people laughing at the same shit going on in a movie. Give Stallone credit for knowing what his audience wanted to see and giving them just that…in spades.

A funny thing happened when I left the movie theater that night, bypassing the epic line that was set up for people to get their cell phones back, which they were made to check so that they were not able to film the entire movie on their iPhone or whatever: My wife and I laughed about how stupid the movie was. We shook our heads at the epic status of the mindless violence. We wondered how the hell we ended up sitting in a theater watching that debacle in a city with theaters showing I’m Not There, Atonement, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, all of which we have not seen yet. And then I got on my phone (thank God I left it in the car), punched in my brother’s number and typed the words, “We are going to see Rambo!!!!” One man’s trash is another man’s treasure? Sometimes, it’s both at the same time.

Image credit to Lions Gate Entertainment.