EvilDirector's Cynical Review of Rambo
*** 1/2 out of ****
"When you’re pushed…killing is as easy as breathing."
Walking out of a showing of Sylvester Stallone’s latest homage to his own Eighties’ icons, my companion and I quickly came to the decision that we needed a bumper sticker to more accurately reflect our newfound measuring stick for life: WWJRD, or What Would John Rambo Do? In modern society, and in modern movies, ambiguity is the order of the day; nothing is black and white, and everything is cast in shades of gray. This has given us nearly fifty years of nuanced characters, in both films and real life, but it has also clouded our view of moral situations and ethical judgments: nothing is right or wrong anymore. John Rambo, and, by extension, his alter-ego in Sylvester Stallone, have given us a throwback to the days when Duke Wayne was always right and the bad guys were always wrong; in doing so, they have also given us the best pure action film of the last decade, an adrenaline rush sure to please younger audiences while Rambo’s quaint morals and nostalgic glance back at the days where killing the bad guys was okay will warm the heart of their parents.
One has to give props to Stallone for revisiting his two great iconic characters, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, and giving each a proper send-off. No longer are Tommy Gunn and the Afghani freedom fighters our last memories of our two great American heroes; Rocky came back with a touching and excellent Rocky Balboa, and now Rambo has done the same. For twenty years or so, John Rambo has been hiding out in the SouthEast jungles, capturing snakes for riverside shows and ferrying travelers up and down the anonymous brown waters. This is not the same Rambo we met back in Washington state in 1982; John has come to grips with what and who he is in the time since: a warrior. When a group of Christian missionaries try to hire him to take them into war-torn Burma, he initially balks at their insistence that violence won’t solve anything; he acquiesces to their request only because one of their number, a woman with understanding eyes for the chiseled “boatman”, convinces him that trying to do good is sometimes success in it’s self. Along the way, the missionaries get a good glimpse of what war is like when river pirates try to board their boat and rape the woman; Rambo kills them all, and finally lets his anger at the missionaries naïve refusal to countenance violence show when the leader, far from thanking him, effectively curses him while the blood of their would-be murderers still steams. In Burma, the missionaries get caught up in the conflict between the Burmese government and the Karen Christian minority, and by caught up I mean that they are mortared, shot, hung up in wicker cages, and tied up as dinner for wild hogs. Rambo is drawn into the rescue mission, along with some mercenaries, and between them, the promises of the extensive trailer campaign are fulfilled: bodies will hit the floor.
There was a lot of negative talk about Stallone’s ability to fill the gloves of Rocky Balboa one last time, and to do it without stretching believability beyond all reason. Not only did Stallone bulk up, but he crafted a story where the aging Balboa faced the same uphill struggle as the aging Stallone, creating a believable parallel that made that film the best Rocky entry after the original. Strangely, the same doubts never crossed my mind when John Rambo first appeared on frame, nearly twenty years after we last saw him in Afghanistan: unlike Balboa, Rambo doesn’t appear any “older”; in fact, he looks damn near timeless, a huge man chiseled seemingly out of solid granite. Stallone also wisely never pushes our believability in Rambo’s abilities: he’s a killer, but he’s not going to run up walls and do back-flips. For most of the thrilling climax, for instance, Rambo does his killing behind a Jeep-mounted fifty-caliber machine gun. Stallone also repeats the feel of Rocky Balboa by virtually cutting any kind of second act from the film, giving everything a tense, lean, relentless pace that well fits the attention-span of younger audiences who are strangers to John Rambo. The director also keeps his American icon out of the Middle East, the obvious choice when it comes to American film heroes nowadays. By placing the film in Burma, Stallone brings Rambo back to the jungle; he also can feel confidant in making the Burmese military into evil bastards deserving of evisceration. Do that with Arabic terrorists and Stallone would have been dodging Jihadist bullets for the rest of his life.
Some have labeled the film “action-porn”, which seems to me a label that gets tossed around a lot in this day and age. Those critics seem to take offense to Rambo’s non-ambiguous tone: there is right, there is wrong, and God help you if you’re the latter, because Rambo will be on your tail. Stallone is unapologetic about betraying carnage: limbs and heads explode, in copious detail and numbers. Somehow, though, I never felt it was “slasher” film carnage: this had a purpose, similar to the violence in The Passion of the Christ. Yes, it was an action thrill-ride of the highest order, extremely ably shot and edited, but it also opened my eyes once again to the true evil out there. There are not always shades of gray, and maybe today’s audiences need a little bit of violence to understand that. Since Rambo was out-performed by the embarrassingly bad Meet the Spartans, I wonder if it isn’t too late; I wonder if we aren’t so used to being politically correct that we’ve lost our teeth, and our taste to see anything in the world as black as pure evil. Stallone wisely doesn’t philosophize about this kind of thing verbally; this is, after all, an action film. But he does provide us enough clues, in the reactions of John Rambo, as to what he really thinks about shades of gray.
In the end, Rambo winds up exactly where the first film began: with John trudging down an American highway in a faded fatigue jacket, a duffel bag over his shoulder. With Rocky Balboa, and now Rambo, Stallone has rectified the mistakes of his youth in the Eighties, and now he has left us with two nearly perfect films in their genres. What will he give us next?
****- Perfect in Execution, Riveting, and Bound to Be A Classic
*** 1/2- Nearly Perfect, Riveting
***- Flawed in Some Manner, But Overall well Made, Entertaining
** 1/2- Flawed, Entertaining on a Guilty-Pleasure Level
**- More Flawed Then Not, Only Occasionally Entertaining
* - Completely Flawed, Never Entertaining