Rambo

[January 30th, 2008]

Welcome to the first in a series of reviews exploring the movies critics aren’t supposed to watch, even though everybody else is. This week, we take a look at Rambo and its $18 million box-office weekend:

It’s been 20 years since the last Rambo film, but Sylvester Stallone is still the same incoherent killing machine he always was. OK, that might be a stretch. At 61, the hypersteroidal stallion’s pure mass dwarfs his shiny self of the ’80s. His forearms are the size of his head (which is also massive). The veins in his neck look like small rivers. Generally speaking, he looks like he was molded from Silly Putty, then placed under a heat lamp. But the important part is that he’s still incoherent, and he’s still capable of killing people. A lot of people. In fact, Rambo kills a good chunk of the country of Burma.

Picking apart Rambo would just be too easy. Setting his self-directed film in Myanmar, Stallone is again unwisely breathing politics into a kill-crazy action film, and it’s sort of sleazy the way the flick invites you to mourn the killing of innocents yet dole out vigorous high-fives as Rambo kills everybody else. John Rambo, living in Thailand as a snake handler (of course), basically ignores the human-rights disaster all round him until dipshit Christian missionaries from Colorado are captured. Kill a brown baby in Burma, Johnny’s too numb to notice. Fuck with a hot blond missionary, and holy hell will break loose. The film is poorly acted and often looks like Stallone shot it in his back yard with volunteers from the local Asian community center. Its politics are convoluted and misguided, its message is asinine, and its very existence seems a sign of the apocalypse.

But you know what? Who gives a fuck? Rambo kills everybody, and the result is quite possibly the most graphically violent, exploitative and concussive movie I’ve ever been pummeled by. Rambo rips a dude’s throat out with his bare hand. He turns a guy to cottage cheese with a .50-caliber machine gun. He shoots a guy through the face with an arrow—and the guy then falls onto a landmine. Bodies explode like water balloons, sending limbs flying. Bone, sinew and entrails drip from our hulking hero. The final 20 minutes of the film, in particular, are a blur of spurts, sprays and fire. I feel numb. I feel stimulated. I feel like I should go to church. High five! R.