by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
C- Rated R 93 min
In all of my analysis of the first trilogy of Rambo movies, I never really considered the fact that I was, more or less, experiencing the films posthumously. I had never seen a Rambo film in the theatre before this fourth and, I assume, final of the Rambo films. Experiencing a Rambo film academically on a small screen ten years after it was harnessing a populist idealogy is taking the entire experience out of context. To truly live fully in the parlance of our times, you must endure a Rambo film while it is still on the big screen.
This film, which worked its way through titles that included Pearl of the Cobra and To Hell and Back before finally deciding on simply Rambo, was co-written, directed and produced by Sylvester Stallone. If you are able to look past his Judge Dredd years, back when Sly wrote the original Rocky, there is a continuity to be noticed. Stallone’s Hollywood story arc has brought his characters from nothingness to the ultimate triumph over an evil empire through both the Rocky and Rambo characters. But in his latest installments in the Rocky saga, we saw the man after his greatness, returning to his roots. This new Rambo follows that same story arc. Whether Stallone is still reflecting the American psyche or if he has simplified back down to just telling his own story is up for the viewer to decide.
We meet a Rambo that is still living a simple life in Thailand. He is struggling with what he is when he is confronted by a group of American missionaries that wish to bring medicine and hope deep into Burma, to victims of ethnic cleansing in the jungles of Asia. Rambo has a boat that can bring them there, but he tries to discourage the idealists from their suicidal mission.
Confronted with the stark morality of one of the missionaries, Sarah (Julie Benz), Rambo agrees to take them to the Karen village. The Karen people are the ones being purged by the Burmese army. The brutality with which the Burmese army dispatches the Karen is not slighted by this picture. People are not simply shot, they are ripped apart by bullets. Women are not just raped, they are brutally gang raped. And no explosion flares across the screen without body parts thrown into the mix. The gore level of the violence portrayed becomes almost laughable as soldiers’ heads explode from their bodies in some scenes.
This brutality is part of what made me realize how much a part of the times a Rambo flick is. Whereas once it was enough to show slow scenes of Rambo very deliberately lacing his boots or tying on his headband, now we need to see him rip a larynx straight out of a throat. Once the action starts, it plays out like a bloody shooter video game complete with the grandest explosion that any action film has dared to stage.
Stallone certainly tried to inject more subtext into this film than in any of the Rambos since the first, and none of it was subtle. As he tried to define himself as a man and a come to terms with the killing machine he has always been, he was shaping metal with a hammer and fire and enduring flashbacks of scenes from all of the previous Rambo films.
Rambo’s trip up the Salween River is like a trip into his heart of darkness. Like in Apacolypse Now, Rambo is Kurtz, a Green Beret with no country. He is the reluctant warrior, but unlike Kurtz, when he is pushed he rekindles his love for doing what is right. The American way. Even when that means killing a messload of tyrants.
“Y’know what you are, what you’re made of. War is in your blood. When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing.”
From the repressed sexual overtones to the simple giving of a necklace, Stallone injects all of those things that are sentimentally Rambo, but more importantly, he kicks ass to the nu metal of Drowning Pool. This may be confusing to some who won’t be sure if this is an army commercial, a hope to make the average American wake up to the atrocious genocide going on in our world, or an indictment about what is wrong with war. The truth is, it’s a little of all of those. But the important thing is that by the end of this film, Rambo is an American again and he looks as much like the Rambo we first met in 1982 as he possibly could 26 years later.
I can’t help but wonder, as Stallone gives final chapters to these characters that have identified his persona as well as America at large in such an iconic way for such a significant piece of our cultural experience, does it mean that he is giving up? Are we watching as a dying Stallone ties up all of his loose ends? We can only hope for a sequel to Copland.
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