After successfully returning to his Rocky role in Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone reprises his other notable onscreen persona, John Rambo, the unstoppable, one-man army who hasn’t been seen on film since 1988.
Rambo has retreated back to the jungles of Thailand, working as a snake farmer for a small village’s tourist attraction. He is approached by a missionary team led by two Americans, Michael (Paul Schulze) and Sarah (Julie Benz), who want to rent his boat to travel up-river to Burma to come to the aid of the Karen people, who are being brutally oppressed by the Burmese military. Rambo declines, claiming that unless they’re taking weapons to Burma they’re not going to change anything in the war zone. When Sarah makes a desperate plea to Rambo, he reluctantly agrees to take them on the condition that if Sarah changes her mind at any point, he will turn the boat around and come back.
Soon after Rambo drops them off at their destination, the missionaries are taken hostage by the Burmese, who also slaughter the villagers the missionaries are helping. When the missionaries do not return to their pick-up point, Rambo is once again contacted to transport another party up-river to the village. This time, it’s a group of mercenaries hired by the church to recover the Michael and Julie’s team. And, this time, Rambo will not simply drop them off and leave. He will help them fight the Burmese military.
According to the trivia page on IMDB.com, there are 2.59 killings per minute in the film’s one hour and 31 minute running time. I wasn’t counting but that certainly seems plausible. That being said, John Rambo is not responsible for all or even most of them. That dubious honor goes to the Burmese military, who slaughter two entire villages’ worth of people. Stallone, who co-wrote and directed, wanted to let the world know about the oppression of the Karen people in Burma (or, as it is officially known, Myanmar.) Unfortunately, his message may go over the heads of the typical mouth-breathing American action movie fan who will simply cheer the excessive carnage without even considering that scenes of this nature occur for real on the other side of the planet. That said, the Rambo series has always been about action and violence, so one can’t really expect anyone to be educated by it. When Rambo gets his opportunity to kick some Burmese ass, I was cheering him on as well.
Stallone’s direction is competent at best and the script is hardly Shakespeare but, somehow, the film manages to be entertaining despite its brainlessness. If you’ve been lamenting the demise of the ultraviolent action films of the 80s, Rambo will be right up your alley.
3.5 out of 5.0 stars
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