What do you do when Tinseltown no longer cares for your career and your latest attempts at an artistic renaissance or cultural relevancy have failed miserably? If you are Sylvester Stallone, you cannibalize your past and hope that someone out there in the film geek world still cares. After 2006’s Rocky Balboa proved that audiences could cotton to a self-referential return to former glory, Stallone decided pissed-off Vietnam Vet John Rambo was due for a comeback. The main question on everyone’s mind was: after three previous instalments of the mercenary and mayhem series, could the actor bring anything new to the show?

The answer is yes, and it’s painted in glorious clots of deep, deep red. When a group of goody-two-shoes religious types get caught up in the middle of Burma’s brutal civil war, a reluctant reverend (Ken Howard) seeks out soldier-turned-snake-wrangler John Rambo for help. And, since our hero guided the original tour into enemy territory, he’s the best man to lead this latest incursion. Of course, when the hired help proves woefully egotistical, Rambo steps up to show them the proper way to kick bad-guy butt.

Besides, he has been ‘spiritually’ touched by the sole female member, an idealist named Sarah (Julie Benz). He must then break into a heavily guarded compound and save her and her friends before a corrupt local general throws them to his collection of flesh-eating pigs, among other inhuman tortures.

Make no mistake about it: things blow up really well in Rambo. Stallone has taken the forgotten skill of human detonation and turned it into an art form. Nothing else about Rambo is particularly memorable. The mission is pointless and Burma could be any hellhole where evil vanquishes good in a hail of bullets. But thanks to the bountiful barrels of blood, what should be dull turns slyly diabolical. You can just imagine our steroided 61-year-old sitting behind the camera, his surgery-tweaked face smiling from ear to ear as a massive machine gun literally cuts special-effects extras in half.

Rambo is a pleasure of the guiltiest, most gratuitous kind. It is the typical heroes-and-villains formula on human growth hormones, laced with crack. It satisfies one’s instinctual Neanderthal bloodlust and busts as many taboos as it embraces. This is a movie that blows big holes in kids during commonplace village raids and angry goon squads lop limbs off the elderly and rape the ladies – both before and after they are dead. Rambo, unlike everyone around him, embraces this truth. He is the lunatic fringe voice of reason in a realm where logic left sanity standing at the altar. His response is the most reasoned – get in there and screw things up.

And that is exactly what this mindless action movie does. The plot is merely a setup followed by a splatterific payoff. But when you are dealing with a one-dimensional death machine like Rambo, disembowelling, dismemberment, and decapitation are all the
depth required.

Bill Gibron