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Rambo (2008) - aka "John Rambo"

Dir: Sylvester Stallone

A group of Christian missionaries, lead by Sarah Miller (Julie Benz, “Angel“) and Michael Burnett (Paul Schulze, “24”) seek a boat to take them from Thailand into Burma to bring medical help to some of the many brutally oppressed farmers/villagers that are being systematically ‘cleansed’ by the Burmese government troops. They are sent to a mysterious American who they are told might help. His name is John Rambo.

After the trials of Vietnam, his violent homecoming, his return to ‘Nam to find POW’s and the betrayal that followed and the mess that was Afghanistan Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) has become a shadow dweller in the Thai jungles, earning a living catching snakes for a local tourist trap.
Initially refusing the missionaries request he eventually agrees to help (thanks to Sarah) and takes them on the perilous boat ride into Burma where they disembark to bring aid to a nearby village.

When the missionaries go missing after an attack on the village, their church hires a group of mercenaries to find them and Rambo agrees to take the mercenaries up river to where he dropped the missionaries off.
But he does not plan to stay with the boat and do nothing, as he now knows you can’t escape your destiny or what you were put on this Earth for. And Rambo was put on this Earth to fight….

 

If you had told me that in 2007/2008 the world would be watching a new “Rocky” movie and a new “Rambo” movie starring and directed by the then almost anonymous Sylvester Stallone I’d have called you a jumping fool who’s been smoking too much of the wacky weed.
How wrong I would have been!

Following the box office, and especially critical, success of “Rocky Balboa” the far more risky project (from a sheer age point of view given what the character is and must do) that would be “Rambo 4” seemed perhaps a step too far in this most unexpected of movie comebacks (even in an age of movie comebacks like “Die Hard 4” and “Indy 4”), especially given the critical and box office failure of Stallone’s last Rambo outing “Rambo III” almost 20 years before.
But Stallone is no fool, never has been, and using his vastly underrated writing and directing skills he manages to sidestep and overcome all the trials and pitfalls that resurrecting Rambo in 2007/8 would automatically bring up and manages to create a fitting, astonishingly brutal, swan-song for the tragic John J.

Opening with actual (explicit) news footage of the very real oppression and genocide being carried out in Burma against ethnic and religious minorities and anti-Government groups (very recently brought to the world’s lethargic attention in the failed pro-democracy demonstrations that saw the world whisper platitudes as people were shot in the streets and Monks were beaten senseless) Stallone warns us that this will be a far darker and visceral entry into the series (never a light watch anyway) and one with perhaps the most heartfelt message.
And it’s a message that comes across far better here, with nothing explicitly stated verbally, than the rather ham-fisted speeches that would mar the end of “Rambo: First Blood part II” and “Rambo III”. In these dark days everyone seems to have matured a little.

After the kick in the guts Mondo montage the fantasy oppression opens before us as troops force villagers run across a paddy field seeded with timed grenades. A most lethal game of chance where even the fortunate end up with a bullet in the head.
From this a great sound edit brings up the title and we finally see Rambo himself as, to my delight, the late Jerry Goldsmith’s superb “First Blood” score swells (like a long lost friend) over the footage of an older but still physically intimidating Rambo (and indeed Stallone) catching snakes.
It’s a superb opening that perhaps shows up the next section as rather weaker than perhaps it would be otherwise.

The biggest fault in the film now is the simpering Sarah Miller who, despite being all Godly, is not unwilling to use the fact she’s a woman to manipulate Rambo into doing what she wants him to do by fluttering her eyelashes and gently touching his arm.
Somehow I did not want to see, the stoic in his personal agenda and beliefs, Rambo being manipulated like a retarded child. Rambo will decide to do things, or not do things, according to his own moral/personal make-up and a simpering manipulator deciding for him seems to diminish the character.
This is not helped by the fact Julie Benz seems unable to shrug off the generally scheming attitude and feel she brought to the ruthless vampire Darla in “Buffy” and “Angel”.
She basically screams, cries and simpers. I for one was glad when she was kidnapped out of the movie for a while.

As far as character problems go thankfully that’s it. And indeed a rare opening up of the plot away from just being Rambo exclusively is the introduction of the mercenary characters.
A mixed race/nationality bunch of cynical hard assess is basically the order of the day and at first the leader of the group, Lewis (Graham McTavish), seems a cartoon creation from hell as in brash Cockney tones he shouts and swears and gives Rambo attitude to such an degree it seems that after the mass murdering Burmese military the next lot of bad guys are the English!
Thankfully the screenplay (by Art Monterastelli and Stallone) moves away from this depiction with not only the inclusion of an English sniper, ‘School Boy’ (Matthew Marsden) who is far more level headed and quite frankly pleasant but the fact it goes on to show that, despite the arrogance and disdain he shows, Lewis is a damn tough soldier.

In fact all the mercs make for an interesting bunch and the script and acting help ensue that a risky ‘opening up the cast’ idea works surprisingly well.
Lewis also has two for the lines in the film;
“It wasn’t your fucking God that saved you, it was us” and the screamingly good, spat out with true British defiance… “you gutless ladyboy cunt”!
Rambo may, of course, have the best line in “Live for nothing... Or die for something” (supposedly taken up for real now by the rebels in Burma!) but those two gems from Lewis make him a memorable character.
Ex-British TV soap opera hunk Marsden is the next best thing as the deadly sniper (who’s heavy grain bullets literally blow people’s head’s off in true crowd pleasing, blast the bad guys, style) and he makes a nice antidote to the brash Lewis and the haunted Rambo.

Stallone himself does a good a job here as we could hope for. He's still an impressive physical sight thus adding to the plausibility of such a comeback and he of course handles the action well. Never the best actor in the world for sure, but a good solid actor when he puts his mind to it, and with a basically limiting role he manages to offer up some character shading and pulls off the final scenes expertly. It's certainly not, at all, the joke I feared it could be given his real age and the action-man character Rambo must be. In fact he does manage to being a weariness to John Rambo that adds again to the realism.

“Action”! “What about the action”, I here you cry. Well it’s a strange thing really.
There is no real ‘action’ in the film for quite a while (a slamming, lightening fast bit of agro with some pirates aside) away from the obviously less than entertaining atrocity set-pieces.
By their very nature and reason for being these are not fun or exciting but they are superbly crafted and shockingly engaging in their high tech slaughter. Bodies are literally blown to pieces, welters of blood erupt into the air, limbs are blasted off and heads disintegrate,
It’s brutal and nasty and does all we need it to do. It brings the reality of Burma to our cinema screens via fantasy reconstruction and makes you think that, as this is not an historical film, these things are happening in real life as you sit in the cinema and watch them in a movie. And of course these scenes prime the purely cinematic ‘kick their assess’ attitude in the audience that makes the eventual revenge so damn satisfying.
The attack on the village where the missionaries are especially has to be one of the most shockingly brutal, expertly crafted sequences seen in cinema for a long time and contains some sickening images and events, so be warned.

The action that comes later is made up of a couple of short and violent skirmishes and a commando style raid. It’s all good and exciting stuff but is grounded (as much as it ever can be) in a reality that is actually quite far away from the 80’s attitude to such scenes.
The only real full on action sequence is the astonishing finale. And it delivers in spades.
Opening with a moment of cinematic gold, as a bass rumble in the score heralds the rising up of Rambo’s head behind a soon the be doomed Burmese soldier, the sequence has to be the most crunching, pounding, slamming and brutally gory action set-piece seen in living memory.
Dozens upon dozens of troops are mowed down by heavy calibre fire that ruptures torsos, blows off limbs, shreds bodies and blows apart the same heads that the owners of were once laughing off as they committed atrocity after atrocity against unarmed men, women and children.
The sequence is rather over the top for sure but it is not cartoonish (as some people have wrongly said) as yes that would happen to a body if it was hit with fire from a 50 calibre machine gun designed to blast through walls.

Is this sequence of extreme, mass body count, violence wrong?
Well only if you think retribution for wrongful acts is wrong. But in that case why are you watching a Rambo film anyway?
Go rent one of the many anti-West, anti-American Iraq based films, that have all spectacularly bombed at the box office, you can feel safe in your self-hate and hypocrisy there.
You reap what you sow as 'The Good Book' sort of says, so even the missionaries should be groovy with it.
In fact even the oft criticised ‘rock’ scene comes down to what is right or wrong.
Is simply lying down and dying and letting your friends die the right thing to do while, with all reluctance and heartache that comes from such an act, defending them and yourself from a cruel and undeserved fate the wrong thing to do?
You decide. I know what I think.

Even saying all that though, the fact is that even during this slam-bang action sequence, (that brings down brutal vengeance on those armed men that chose to butcher and rape the helpless) there is a darkness to the proceedings here that is quite unlike any other “Rambo” movie and the sheer scale and explicitness of the carnage means that even the deaths of the bad guys (and if you don’t think they are straight up bad guys there‘s no hope for you) has a bludgeoning effect on the viewer that takes off much (though essentially not all) the ‘popcorn munching thrill’ to the proceedings because we see just what it means to wallow in the brutality of warfare and to see sights that, no matter how right you feel your actions are, you will never able to remove from your mind.

In fact there is an effectively dignified ending to the proceedings after the last bullet has been fired as well as we see that once again Rambo is the one outside of everything, the one with perhaps the biggest, if unseen, wounds of anyone.
But the final scene itself offers up some kind of hope, some kind healing for a wronged character who has now simply seen far too much of all that is bad in the world.
It’s a fantastic moment for fans of the series and the character and, backed again by that great score, it brings it all full circle to what might have been if it had not been for a fateful meeting with a small town Sheriff all those years ago.
It has flaws yes, but it’s not a mindless killing fest, it does have something to say (and so called activist moralists should really consider who the bad guys are here, not just in the film but in the current, real life, situations this film directly and indirectly highlights) and Stallone does manage to deliver a movie both dark and bludgeoning, but also thrilling and exciting.