2008 DVD Review: Rambo

John Rambo is back and he...looks like he's been stung by sixty or seventy bees. Yes, Sly Stallone continues his never ending battle to regain his cinematic relevance by exploiting the success of his earlier franchise, even though he now seems to be wider than he is tall, and looks like someone went upside his head with a two by four. The film compensates for Sly's onrushing senescence by keeping him immobile for most of the run time. He spends the first hour or so glumly piloting a skiff down a river in Burma. In the climactic battle scene, Rambo (who, for the first time in the history of the franchise, keeps his shirt on the whole time) simply stands in the back of a flatbed truck, turning Burmese soldiers into hamburger with a machine gun without breaking a sweat. No hanging from helicopter skids or dangling from trees for this action hero for the AARP set.

To make up for the grindly mopey hero's lack of dynamism, Stallone (who co-wrote and directed!) throws the gore knob to eleven. The evil Burmese troops don't just get shot, they explode like meat pinatas, spraying chunks of appendage and ropes of intestines with each inexplicably gigantic bullet hit. I'll admit that one of my big weaknesses when it comes to action films is outrageously over-the-top bullet hits. Give me a Barret fifty caliber sniper rifle evaporating heads, legs getting chopped off with bullets, and mortar rounds sending cartwheeling spleens into the air, and I'm in grindhouse nirvana. Rambo served up all of the above with gusto. However, this dedication to delivering blood-and-guts makes the film ethically problematic. In addition to making himself viable at the box office again, Stallone's other clear agenda with this movie is to bring attention to the outrages of the Burmese military junta and their campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Karen minority. It's an important topic, but when you stage the massacre of a village full of Karen peasants with the unrestrained hyperviolence of Planet Terror, it ends up trivializing the plight of real people. This is sort of the same problem that Spielberg had with the Krakow ghetto liquidation scene in Schindler's List, but much worse. There's a giddy bloodlust in the sequence that is especially unsettling, especially considering that the military oppression of the Karen people in Burma is something that is happening right now. Who would ever have guessed that noted human rights theorist and auteur Sly Stallone fails at addressing a real humanitarian issue with sensitivity or insight. Still: when Rambo shoots a dude with a heavy maching gun at point blank range and he turns into a geyser of red goo? Awesome!