film: Rambo 4

Sly Stallone is back with an ultra-violent sequel to the movies that made his name. Rambo 4 takes the eponymous hero to Burma to deal with the bad guys in his usual fashion. You should know from the outset that watching this movie is not for the faint-hearted.

So what’s the plot? Former Vietnam war veteran John Rambo has opted for a peaceful life by becoming a fisherman in Thailand. However, Rambo’s chilled out existence is jepoardised when a Christian aid group ask him to be their guide into Burma. The mission goes wrong when the workers are taken hostage by an evil militia group, and Rambo is forced to go and save them.

If you’ve seen Rambo 1, 2, or 3 you know what to expect from a Rambo movie and it’s not marshmallows, fluffy rabbits and satin sheet. Think rippling muscles, buckets of testosterone, limited dialogue and guns. Lots and lots of guns.

This, the latest incarnation of the Rambo franchise manages to do the impossible and increase the violence stakes. Director Stallone has clearly gone for the gross out angle and shows us throats being ripped out, rape, heads being blown off, torsos being sperated from legs and even a stick going through one character’s shredded shin.

Now there’s long been an argument that violent films encourage violent behaviour in their viewers. I for one used to think it was a ridiculous notion, but I have to say that this movie actually made me feel physically angry. When I watched it, I actually wanted to wrestle a bear, fist fight a WWF wrestler, go 10 rounds with Mike Tyson, get a machete and go mental in a shopping mall cutting up lots of small children and then getting a gun and blasting the hell out of everyone in the street.

Fortunately my desire to do damage to myself and other people quickly subsided and all I was left with was Stallone’s embarrassingly poor dialogue.

In fact, I’d go as far as saying that the script is one of the worst to come out of Hollywood in years. It attempts to be profound, but ends up sounding asinine. But violence and shitty scripts aside, the biggest tragedy about Rambo is that the lead character is sidelined for most of the movie, crazy considering he is the main event. All in all, not particularly satisfying stuff folks. It makes you want to kill and then leaves you bored and dissatisfied. Two stars.

For the best of the rest:

Timeout:
‘When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing,’ mumbles John Rambo (Stallone), that Great Redwood of an action hero with the greased mullet and soiled head-band who has lived by a strict code of Reaganisms for nigh-on thirty years. The fact that ‘Rambo’ contains a record-beating 236 on-screen kills suggests that breathing is actually a complex quadratic equation in comparison.

Empire:
John Rambo got tamed. In the two-decade hiatus that separates his last outing from this month’s simply titled Rambo (formerly John Rambo, Rambo IV, Rambo IV: In The Serpent’s Eye), the Vietnam vet has taken up fishing, packed on a few pounds and nailed a faux-peaceful look to his strangely unwrinkled features. But Sylvester Stallone wants us to believe that somewhere underneath his massive frame still lies a killing machine. Tough job, since he slumbers through his own movie as a supporting character, rather than the one-man army who almost single-handedly created the genre that defined the ’80s.

The Telegraph:
Burma is the location of Sylvester Stallone’s fourth outing as the vengeful Rambo: brief introductory footage of protesting Buddhist monks and gabbled TV voice-overs about the “conflict” there confirm it. But, to put it mildly, Rambo gives short shrift to the intricacies of Burma’s political crisis.