The 21st century finds John Rambo earning a meager living in Thailand, where--with the help of some local friends--he collects specimens for a tourist trap snake show. One day, he’s approached by a group of American missionaries who want to hire him and his boat to take them upriver to Burma, where they hope to minister aid to tribes people who are being brutalized by the Burmese regime. Rambo is understandably reluctant to deliver this bunch of fresh-faced, decent people into the maws of death, so he turns them down flat out.
But one of the missionaries, Sarah Miller (engagingly played by Julie Benz)
manages to reach out to Rambo, and convinces him to take her and the others to
their dangerous destination against Rambo’s better judgment. It goes without
saying that she probably should have done well to listen to Rambo. If the 1980s
were known as the era of the action film, then this might well be called the
Last Gasp Decade--thanks to Bruce Willis playing John McClane one more time in
Live Free Or Die Hard; Harrison Ford giving Indiana Jones another go in Indiana
Jones and The Temple of the Crystal Skulls, and now Sylvester Stallone returning
to the role of Rambo.
Clocking in at a lean, mean 91 minutes, Rambo cuts right to the chase, as well as cutting out all the chest beating macho filler that plagued previous films. Stallone, who co-wrote and directed, was 60 years old at the time of filming, and he still looks very convincing as a retired killing machine who’s called in for one last rescue. Instead of being a one man army, he’s got help from a group of mercenaries, and instead of the stinking commies, he squares off against the cruel soldiers of the Burmese military (Stallone seems to have a sixth sense for picking Rambo villains; in May of 2008, just a few weeks before Rambo’s DVD release, the Union of Myanmar--formerly known as Burma--made the news with their mishandling of international aid to cyclone victims in their country).
Rambo is an intense ride that’s not for anybody with a weak stomach. The
battlefield gore--particularly the atrocities committed by the Burmese
soldiers--is shocking to watch; yet it works well within the context of the
film; as does presenting Rambo as being more of a down to earth commando, rather
than the invincible super-soldier that he was in previous films. While Rambo is
still basically an action film with all the trimmings, Stallone has wisely
changed Rambo to fit the times, and he surrounds himself with an able cast of
actors. Julie Benz comes off as being very sympathetic, and still has a strong
screen presence, despite being understandably overwhelmed by events in the film’s
last third.
The DVD I reviewed has a decent special features section that contains a commentary by Stallone, along with six making of documentaries, and deleted scenes. The 2-Disc Special Edition of Rambo has a digital copy of the entire film on the second disc that can be downloaded to your computer (both Mac and PC compatible). When I first heard that Stallone was bringing Rambo back, I groaned at the idea, thinking that some characters deserve to be left back in the lurid 1980s action film cinema. But thanks to a more somber, gritty treatment that eschews the overwrought hysterics of its predecessors, the return of Rambo proved to be a very enjoyable, and satisfying, ride.
--SF
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