Eric D. Snider
Rambo
Movie Review
"Rambo"
Review by Eric D. Snider
Grade: C-
Rating: R
Released: Friday, January 25, 2008
Directed by:
Cast:
Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky Balboa" was an elegantly suitable requiem for a beloved character. His "Rambo," on the other hand, is very clearly a cynical cash-grab, made not because he had some good ideas for the character but because he wanted to capitalize on it.
It's obvious in the way the film is put together. Stallone realized that the thing everyone liked best about the last two Rambo movies was how violent they were, so he increased the bloodshed tenfold. The new film, the fourth in the series, is packed not just with death but with bloody, violent, horrific death. There are dismemberments and maimings. The mayhem is constant. That's what you wanted, right?
The story is retard-simple. Rambo, the embittered Vietnam-veteran expatriate, is living in Thailand, where he spends his time collecting snakes and being oily and lumpy. An American Christian group led by Michael Burnett (Paul Schulze) finds him and asks for his help in going up the river into Burma. He transports them, though he doubts they'll be able to do any real good for the poor people there without bringing a lot of weapons and explosives with them. Violence, you see, is the only real way of effecting change.
Sure enough, the Christians get captured by Burmese militants, who are in the midst of an ethnic cleansing of the Karen tribe. (Note: The Karen are a real people, and they are not named after Karen Carpenter.) Rambo, joined by a batch of mercenaries who show up fortuitously, must return to Burma and rescue the Christians, primarily the beautiful Sarah (Julie Benz).
As you might expect, rescuing the innocents from the evil Burmese requires killing hundreds of people. Stallone (who directed the film and co-wrote it with Art Monterastelli) depicts this in vivid, graphic detail, and shoots many scenes in the jittery style so trendy among action-flick directors these days.
The dialogue, of course, is dumb, consisting mostly of declarations of platitudes like, "Live for nothing or die for something," while the action is senseless and loud. A good guy is injured and his fellows must make a stretcher out of bamboo and raw materials, and what they come up with looks nicer than anything you could buy from a medical supply wholesaler. Rambo fires a machine gun at a line of people and actually perforates one man into two pieces. Things explode for no reason. Et cetera.
Eventually even the pacifist pastor Burnett must kill someone, even though he once said, "Taking a life is never right." He does it in the most brutal way imaginable, too, by bashing a rock against the enemy's head repeatedly. He should have listened to Rambo in the first place, who said, "When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathin'."
Yes, it's a fine message of peace and brotherhood. John Rambo, a tragic and misunderstood character in "First Blood," went on to become the poster child for over-the-top violence and badly written shoot-em-up pictures. The new film continues that tarnished legacy, though we do learn one interesting thing about Rambo: He's no less coherent when speaking Burmese than he is when speaking English.
Grade: C-
Rated R, pervasive harsh profanity, pervasive bloody and brutal violence
1 hr., 33 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 12 comments
January 30, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Oh no! My tribe is being eradicated! I better gather my arsenal and head to Burma! (I thought it was called Myanmar now...)
January 30, 2008 at 9:44 pm
This RAMBO was the most violent movie I've seen in a long time. Hey it's RAMBO though. Why would anybody go see a RAMBO film anyway? It sure isn't because of a good story. Some of the violence was truly graphic with gore galore. I liked the movie. It's also a "GUY" movie. Girls can stay home and bake cookies.
January 31, 2008 at 7:51 am
I'm not at home baking cookies. I am in the next theater watching Sweeney Todd, a fantastic story about a barber who kills people and has his neighbor bake them into pies. So, pies...cookies. Totally a "chick flick" because of the baking connection.
January 31, 2008 at 11:12 am
Someone just got served ... cookies.
February 1, 2008 at 8:39 am
Who else burst out laughing at thought of a pastor dressed like a Catholic priest bashing some Burmese guy's head in with a rock? It was probably just Eric's choice of "bashing" that did it for me.
February 3, 2008 at 7:24 am
If I hadn't seen that exact same imagery in almost every single movie featuring a Catholic priest before, then it might actually be pretty funny. But right now it's almost as hilarious as the old "foul-mouthed granny" bit or the part in every movie where a baby urinates like a fountain in someone's face.
February 4, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I haven't seen it yet. But the possibility of a machine gun cutting someone in half isn't that far fetched.
February 22, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Yeah I questioned that guy-being-blown-in-half thing by a gun when I saw the movie. Then the friend I was with clarified that the gun Rambo was using was armed with those kind of bullets that planes use (about 8"-12" in length and about 1"-2" thick), and it became more believable. Also, Rambo had to stand on a platform and fire the gun with both hands, so I think it was originally meant to shoot down planes from the sky and make passing cars blow up.
I mean, I guess the Burmese militants had it up on a hill, you know, for...their own use. I guess you have to have heavy-duty weapons stationed throughout your territory in case a bloody battle ensues and you have to find something to kill lots of people with, and fast.
Wow...I just really over-analyzed that. Wow.
February 24, 2008 at 2:52 pm
just come back from cinema what a fab film stallone is a great entertainer
February 25, 2008 at 9:28 pm
this movie was awsome and the combat scenes are acurate. the machine gun rambo was on was a 50cal machine gun and will blow a man in half. What was shown in this film is acurate i seen it with a good friend of mine who is an Iraq war veteran and he says thats the kind of carnage a 50 can rain. Things explodeing for no reason? i didnt see any of that...there were things being blown up by mortars in this movie...the person that judged this film must not have paid much attention and lacked knowledge of general warfare.
May 30, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I try to be understanding about how everyone can have a different opinion, different tastes, but something about mispelling words like "explodeing" and "acurate" makes that much more difficult.
I wonder if anyone else agrees that this is an attempt to capitalize on the "let's remake something popular from the 1980's" market that is so popular with filmmakers today? A vain attempt to duplicate the sure-success expected from Indiana Jones, I'm sure. I wonder how long until "The Return of E.T." is made (don't bother checking; it isn't on the horizon yet).
If the bad-parody movie is looking for fodder, I'm sure there is more than enough material from this film. What if they were JEWISH people being saved instead of Christians?! And what if we had EVERY plant blow up at random?! Omg lol wtf bbq! (::rolls his eyes::) :-
September 4, 2008 at 3:25 am
I will agree: this was not a good movie. It was over-the-top violent, the message was not exactly one I agree with. The acting wasn't anything special, and the story was nothing original.
Oddly, this movie was far more popular than any of the remotely anti-iraq/anti-war movies that have come out the past year or so. Redacted, Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, etc. I don't quite know what it means, but maybe people would rather watch trash that says war isn't always evil than something that tells them their country is evil and their soldiers are murderers.