The Best 80's Action Movie Made In The 21st Century
Rambo, the newest edition to the First Blood franchise in almost 20 years, is without a doubt the best 80's action movie made in the 21st Century. It made me long for the days of Golan-Globus epics like Missing In Action, American Ninja and Delta Force. It is a longing rooted in simpler times when the action was cartoonish and over the top and came equipped with great one-liners.
Rambo is also the most violent movie I have seen in a very long time. Stallone has ramped up the slam-bang to eleven on this one, and the carnage is massive. Heads explode, limbs get severed, bodies immolate from land mines. And just when it starts getting good, it is over.
There is no story here, only a whiff of a plot device to get our man back in the jungle to kill anyone who gets in his way. The baddies are nameless caricatures of evil whose only defining characteristic is sadism for sadism's sake. Rambo must take them on to rescue a bunch of well-meaning but clueless missionaries trying to help the people of Burma survive a civil war. As a twist, he gets to do it with a band of mercenaries, all the standard cookie-cutter variants like the crew in Predator. There is the loud-mouth Aussie lifted directly from Commando and the nice guy with a conscience who looks alarmingly like Michael Biehn in Terminator. The rest are pretty much there to take some shrapnel for Rambo.
Apart from that the only thing I could really take away from it all was that context is everything. This same sort of carnage was used to great effect in Saving Private Ryan, underscoring the nastiness of war and what it does to people. Stallone has grafted this gruesomeness onto a popcorn action movie, and for what? The last third of the flick is nothing but one long body count, all nasty, all more horrible than the last. And that's when it hit me: Rambo is the movie where they took Jason Vorhees and made him an action hero. Rambo not only rips a man's throat out with his bare hands, but kills the main baddie by disemboweling him with a bowie knife after ripping apart a whole Burmese battalion with a mounted M60 machine gun.
It is action porn. And if anything like this would have been made in the 80's, my fourteen-year-old self would have loved every stinking minute of it. But since it was made in 2007, my 36-year-old self just sat there gob-smacked at the bloodlust. The only real thoughts I had regarding this whole exercise were: the ratings board is so fucked up that this is the cut they finally allowed... I would love to make the same movie with a topless woman instead of Rambo and see what they make me cut out first. Naked boobies, or that third exploding head?
So this thing gets the big Hollywood treatment and Michael Dudikoff hasn't had a gig in six years? That's the biggest travesty of them all. That, and the fact that Rambo never got his big teary, preachy breakdown at the end. It is better to burn out than fade away. And sometimes people should just leave well enough alone. As Rambo advises the missionaries at the beginning, Go home.
Rambo is also the most violent movie I have seen in a very long time. Stallone has ramped up the slam-bang to eleven on this one, and the carnage is massive. Heads explode, limbs get severed, bodies immolate from land mines. And just when it starts getting good, it is over.
There is no story here, only a whiff of a plot device to get our man back in the jungle to kill anyone who gets in his way. The baddies are nameless caricatures of evil whose only defining characteristic is sadism for sadism's sake. Rambo must take them on to rescue a bunch of well-meaning but clueless missionaries trying to help the people of Burma survive a civil war. As a twist, he gets to do it with a band of mercenaries, all the standard cookie-cutter variants like the crew in Predator. There is the loud-mouth Aussie lifted directly from Commando and the nice guy with a conscience who looks alarmingly like Michael Biehn in Terminator. The rest are pretty much there to take some shrapnel for Rambo.
Apart from that the only thing I could really take away from it all was that context is everything. This same sort of carnage was used to great effect in Saving Private Ryan, underscoring the nastiness of war and what it does to people. Stallone has grafted this gruesomeness onto a popcorn action movie, and for what? The last third of the flick is nothing but one long body count, all nasty, all more horrible than the last. And that's when it hit me: Rambo is the movie where they took Jason Vorhees and made him an action hero. Rambo not only rips a man's throat out with his bare hands, but kills the main baddie by disemboweling him with a bowie knife after ripping apart a whole Burmese battalion with a mounted M60 machine gun.
It is action porn. And if anything like this would have been made in the 80's, my fourteen-year-old self would have loved every stinking minute of it. But since it was made in 2007, my 36-year-old self just sat there gob-smacked at the bloodlust. The only real thoughts I had regarding this whole exercise were: the ratings board is so fucked up that this is the cut they finally allowed... I would love to make the same movie with a topless woman instead of Rambo and see what they make me cut out first. Naked boobies, or that third exploding head?
So this thing gets the big Hollywood treatment and Michael Dudikoff hasn't had a gig in six years? That's the biggest travesty of them all. That, and the fact that Rambo never got his big teary, preachy breakdown at the end. It is better to burn out than fade away. And sometimes people should just leave well enough alone. As Rambo advises the missionaries at the beginning, Go home.