Rambo


Dir: Sylvester Stallone
91 Mins
2008











A group of Christian missionaries approach Rambo in Thailand with a view to travelling as passengers in his boat to Burma. At first refusing due to the danger of war in the area Rambo finally acquienses when approached by the female of the party. Rambo leaves the missonaries in Burma after an attack by pirates on the river. The missionaries are subsequently attacked in Burma by the Burmese military, those not killed are held hostage at a large base. Rambo is contacted in Thailand again, this time by a group of mercenaries leading a rescue attempt for the missionaries. Rambo transports the mercenaries to Burma and joins them in the rescue mission.

What with big buisness being wrung from films coming in at least three parts more and more now it is unsurprising that Stallone should turn his attention toward the character of his greatest role in First Blood (1982). What is suprising is how simplified and essentially pointless the whole franchise has become. Charting well away from the morality issues and the powerful sense of never being able to go home in the first film, Stallone is merely content with serving up a xenophobic one man slaughterfest contained within a script so plodding and mechanical that you can almost hear the cranks grinding. Of what little dialogue there is in the film is heavy on exposition and therefore naturality, in one of the few occasions when the dialogue is anything otherwise it is to flesh out an absurd mockney mercenary that could of accidentally walked on set from a Guy Ritchie film. This is all still no reason however to underwrite Rambo himself to the point that he has less than a handful of lines in the entire film. For all the brooding that Stallone does as Rambo I started to interpret this less as suffering in silence and more as silence because of mental vacancy as the film progressed.

Of course many of the audience immediately drawn to Rambo will want to see war and a one man killing machine doing a great deal of killing. The marketing of the film has been spot on in that regard. In this expectation Stallone does not disappoint, in fact he throws so much carnage and death into the film that it reaches a level of hysteria boardering on absurdity. Stallone proficiently makes use of CGI flying stumps to accomplish this. With the bodycount so high and the relentless nature of the film, built around two main set pieces, it is the closest film to a video game I have yet seen. One ends up wondering why Stallone did not go the whole hog and create a full synergy between film and game, giving the viewer a joypad to control the action and aim. This would certainly make the film more interesting. We should however remember why video games always make unfullfilling films. Rambo may be one of the first films that would make a much better game, it certainly has nothing to lose in transition.
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