Reel To Reel: Rambo

Bloody hell.

How It Rates: * (and that's being generous)
Starring: Sylvester Stallone
Rated: R
Red Flags: Graphic, Bloody And Sustained War Violence, Sexual Assault, Strong Language

Rambo is so bloodthirsty I had to check my shirt for spatter marks after walking out of the theater. It guns down, assaults, burns, decapitates, carves, stabs, dismembers and blows up hundreds of bodies. It gushes of red, taking CGI and squib effects to levels of unapologetic grotesqueness. Watching the film made me think I was in A Clockwork Orange, where delinquent-turned-Christian Alex De Large is forced to watch sadistic motion pictures as part of an experiment to cure his depravity. The only thing this film cured was my notion of Sylvester Stallone -- who directed and co-wrote -- tying a neat bow on the John Rambo saga a la Rocky Balboa.

The title character emerges from hiatus as a laconic snake-hunter and boat captain in the jungles of Thailand. It's understandable enough for an old soldier with deep-welled anger, forsaken by the country he fought for. A group of missionaries comes to him seeking a ride up the river to war-plagued Burma where they can minister and feed what villagers haven't been killed or forced into the army. He turns them down, but wouldn't you know they would be carrying Sarah (Julie Benz), a beautiful charismatic young woman with them? So with her persuasion, Rambo navigates them there. He runs into a gang of pirates who are not the kind Jack Sparrow (or Bartholomew Burgundy) would hang out with. Facing capture or worse, Rambo cuts them down with the impossible resourcefulness of a battle-hardened Green Beret. Rambo is back. He's bad. He's invincible. But with the Sixth Commandment trumping security, he's not needed once the aid workers step off his boat.

As we would expect, the missionaries get to the village, start doing the Lord's work and then find themselves overrun by the Burmese Army in an unexpurgated sequence of killing and maiming and detonating and raping -- the second such sequence of the movie when coupled with a news-footage prologue explaining the country's strife. For no reason other than need of a plot hook, the soldiers take the missionaries alive.

Several days later, the pastor of the missionaries' church finds Rambo and asks him to take a bunch of mercenaries where his flock went. This is the part where I would expect Rambo to step up and say, "You're gonna need more than that."

"Like what?" the pastor would answer.

"Like me," Rambo would reply in one of those ta-da moments.

But we don't get that satisfaction. Rambo, whose character arc swings between passive-aggressive and ticked off, muses in voiceover: "When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing." Well, duh. Didn't we see that already?

Our hero leads a group of rag-tag soldiers of fortune upstream, including an ex-SAS bloke who has probably dropped more f-bombs than actual bombs. This time, Rambo insists on bringing up the rear over the objections of the foul-mouthed Brit. Guess what -- this motley crew makes it to the battle-desolated village with its rotting corpses and heads on sticks and finds itself about to be ambushed by the Burmese. Then -- TA-DA! -- there's Rambo and his trusty crossbow!

A rescue mission to the enemy camp follows, then the mother-of-all-battle scenes with -- you guessed it -- more copious bloodletting, decapitations, bullet spray, and another ta-da moment. We also get to see the awesome power of a Claymore mine, which Wikipedia defines as "a directional anti-personnel mine" firing "steel balls." This version resembles a micro-nuke without the radiation. Let's also not forget the compulsory element: Rambo's big confrontation with the commanding officer. Ever gut a deer?

I dare give you so much plot information, dear readers, because the ultimate atrocity of the film isn't its unrestrained violence; it's the failure to let Rambo be Rambo. You remember the renegade who could singlehandedly take out dozens of enemy troops, who could ignore pain, who could cake himself with mud and survive in conditions killing scores of men with about the same amount of dialogue as Tarzan. Rambo: First Blood Part II built up a legend of testosterone. It perfected the genre of paramilitary adventure. Rambo the Fourth reduces Stallone's character to axle grease, injected into key moments instead of mad and loose throughout the film.

The choice of Burma as a location puzzles me. It's humanitarian and noble but devoid of a rallying cry. Shouldn't Rambo go into Pakistan and kick Osama Bin Laden's behind? Audiences lapped up the second First Blood picture partly because we won Vietnam on film. It still reeked of brutality and cheese, but it did so in a cathartic, patriotic way during the height of Ronald Reagan's America. Rambo doing his thing to Al-Qaida might divert our minds from the mess the War On Terror has generated.

No, I didn't hate this picture. I despised, loathed, disliked and abhorred it for royally messing up a film icon while amping up the grossness. The only reason it earned a single star is the ending scene, which elicits a glimmer of hope -- hope that either the whole thing is over, or that maybe a new chapter can be written in the Rambo saga with some redeeming quality.