Post by ronnierocketago on Jan 29, 2008 6:23:53 GMT
RAMBO (2008) - ***
In watching the big action climax in RAMBO when the Burmese freedom fighters arrive to help Rambo kick some ass, I had deja vue flashbacks of RAMBO III where you had similar insurgents in Afghanistan make an ambush charge against the big bad Soviets.
You know, Rambo's buddies who repaid America's help by crashing airplanes into the World Trade Center.
Considering that writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone wanted his iconic action hero to be very pessimistic about humanity in his hermit lifestyle, he should have made a point of how John Rambo once tried to help a people in great need, and ended up inadvertedly helping the future Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.
I would definately have bought why such a person voluntarily bannishes himself into the deep jungles of Burma out of shame, and refuses initially to help some folks out.
That's such a goddamn goldmine of an idea wasted, and that's my beef with Stallone as a scriptwriter. He displays some good ideas, or at least concepts that are worth playing around as genre junk in even the worst RAMBO and ROCKY pictures.
His problem is that he's notoriusly just lazy and pens shortcuts. It makes me wonder how he ever pulled off ROCKY without pulling a ROCKY II.
Take the scene between Rambo and the mercenaries. There is a point to be made about these bitter soldiers of fortune, without nations or allegiances, deciding to put their asses on the line for an unselfish noble cause. It's pure action junk, but Akira Kurosawa made a masterpiece in THE SEVEN SAMURAI out of such material.
Instead, Stallone wastes this subplot as simply an excuse for why they follow his command. I would have figured Rambo killing a Burmese platoon with ease was enough, but whatever.
What is funny is that while RAMBO tries to cut back (somewhat) on the cartoonish stupidity that I just outright despise about the other RAMBO sequels, its team-mission story structure is a pure theft of James Cameron's damn good script draft for RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II.
Like that script, RAMBO tries to make a point that while Stallone is a badass solo fighting machine in the original FIRST BLOOD, he can't take on an army by himself with pure ease, guns that never need to be reloaded, and steroid muscles. You know, like the film version of FIRST BLOOD PART II we unfortunately got instead.
There are other tiny things in RAMBO that annoy me. Why did the paper-thin butcher of a villain have to be gay?
I know in Stallone's world, this is "depth," but instead its just shallow and for the Christian Missionary captives in the film, I'm sure it gives them moral justification to hold back those sodomites back in America. Also, where did all those enemy soldiers come from in the finale?
Plus, whats with that gratuitous mass rape scene? You have Rambo save a white American Christian woman from getting jumped, but he ignores the natives that get the NYC Subway ride.
Did this hero of the Reagan Decade become a racist towards all Asians this side of Mickey Rourke in YEAR OF THE DRAGON because the Vietnamese beat him up with bamboo and leeches? What an asshole.
So in spite of my rants, why did I sorta enjoy RAMBO? Because the action scenes are perhaps the most intensive, more violent, and most balls-to-the-wall we've seen in American action cinema since ROBOCOP. People don't fall down via the magical PG-13 rating or digital-blood.
No, they all get ripped to bits in this good ole fashion squid-orgy, though when Stallone gets behind the machine gun, its literally more of a squash-fest. Like ROBOCOP, it abuses the hell out of its R-rating, and then some.
In that regard, the fourth and perhaps final John Rambo adventure is the only watchable sequel to the original and best FIRST BLOOD if only because this aint (as much) Stallone the egomaniac of the 80s who had to win both the Cold War and Vietnam after the fact.
I do think though that its ironically funny that Stallone trashed Cameron's draft for FIRST BLOOD PART II back in the day for being "moody"...and yet inbetween the arrows, bullets, and rain...that's what RAMBO is.