“…sort of like Beyond Rangoon, but with rocket launchers” is how Sylvester Stallone has described the return of John J. Rambo. Both actor and creation are older and heavier, their voices are just as clear and the face looks melted but I’ll be damned if it ain’t an enjoyable movie.
I was never a fan of the ‘Rambo’ series. First Blood is, to my mind, one of the finest action movies ever made but the ‘Rambo’ titled rubbish that followed were nothing more than pathetic wish-fulfilment jingoism. They represented everything that was wrong with that particulary musclebound strain of 80’s American cinema. Flash forward twenty years and Stallone has had the good sense to strip John J. of all the nationalistic guff that made him so reprehensible.
We find our hero living in Thailand catching snakes for a living. Enter some Christian missionaries who charter him to transport them to Burma to dish out Bibles and medicine …of course they are taken hostage by the Burmese army (people that we can all agree to hate without any tricky political connotations – hang on, does this make it pathetic liberal wish fulfilment?) and our man must find them and kick respective butt.
Basically if you buy a ticket for this film you strike the following deal; spend twenty minutes or so listening to cod-philosophy and trying to understand old mumble lips then get rewarded with about an hour of explosions and carnage …and it’s a deal worth making because whilst Rambo may be dumb and extremely violent (even by the standards of the series although this has more in common with the comic book excesses of Robocop) it is incredibly good fun. In fact it shows that for all the bells and whistles of intelligence and nuance sometimes nothing beats a good old fashioned can of whoop-ass.
Buy a ticket, turn off your brain and enjoy.
6/10
p.s. just how many people has this guy killed?
The below chart calculates the figure at 220 and by my reckoning that (plus the severe lack of lovin’) equals severe psychological trauma … Rambo V: The Breakdown anyone?
the odeon are not showing the film for commercial decsions, I would of thought that this would have been a good film for them. more than meets the eye with this one me thinks
Posters were up at our local Odeon so this seems to be a recent decision. ‘Commercial reasons’ could mean more that simply not expecting it to sell many tickets etc – Sony could be asking for higher screening fees etc and Odeon might not want to concede / set a precedent etc. Rambo still did very well at the box office considering Odeon’s refusal to screen it so I don’t think they were thinking of just box office.