Grade: B-
"When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing."
Sylvester Stallone's 11th hour attempts to resurrect his biggest money-maker franchises -- first Rocky Balboa, now Rambo -- are not, it is now clear, cynical attempts to cash in on his brand name and legacy. The best part of watching Rambo is arriving at the realization that he is actually rescuing the characters he loves from the realm of camp and kitsch. With these new films, both of which he wrote and directed, he is trying to reverse the damage he did to Rocky and John Rambo with the terrible 1980's sequels to the iconic original films. It's a form of atonement, and it's really quite touching.
Rambo, unlike Rocky Balboa, does feel a bit insubstantial; a little like a third sequel. You'd never know from the tone, which is somber and humorless -- the movie is dead serious about what it thinks is its pitch-black view of human nature -- but the flimsy plot, straining to turn a frivolous little rescue mission into an iconic hero's journey, makes the film feel like a tempest in a teapot. Stallone clearly wants Rambo's history to do a lot of the work here, judging by the several tortured flashbacks to days when the star was not a senior citizen. It's a smart approach, and the tired, taciturn hero does lend the proceedings a lot of weight. But Rambo's last adventure can't help but feel abbreviated, all the violence (and boy is there violence) seeming out of place in a film that is ultimately neither all that serious (though it tries to be) or vast in scope. There is a dissonance between Stallone's newfound character focus and the bad-*** First Blood-style actioner he is nonetheless harkening to.
When Stallone isn't lingering on the massacring of Burmese villagers and children being speared by ruthless militiamen, he does manage to lend the film a dignified, almost stately air. Rambo is a man of few words, but he is not a monosyllabic meathead; when he talks, what he says seems calculated and spare, the words of a man who has seen it all and doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. Stallone grants Rambo the rare cinematic privilege of silence, too, and during these stretches he looks like he is carrying the world on his shoulders. You can see the old John Rambo in the sad, jaded eyes of this one.
Of course, the movie eventually explodes into an orgy of violence. When this takes the form of Rambo unleashing a world of hurt on Burmese baddies, it approaches the euphoric pinnacles of the franchise and other exemplars of the 80's one-man-against-the-world action genre -- moral ambiguity is tossed out the window and a hero dispenses simple, brutal justice. When the violence is unleashed on defenseless innocents, it's more problematic; Stallone is making an attempt to shed light on real-life atrocities going on in the world, but whether he earns the right to depict them so graphically in this context is an open question.
There's a semblance of a thesis: we can't leave the hellholes of the world to the missionaries and do-gooders; they aren't equipped to make them any better. ("Are you bringing in any guns?" "Of course not." "Then you aren't changing anything.") I'm not sure that Rambo has any better ideas over and above sending in its title character; I suppose one could read the film as advocating military intervention, but Stallone never really makes that case. The film's bottom line is that Rambo will kick all ***, which is fine, except that the slaughters of the helpless it depicts wind up leaving a bad taste.
Rambo is at its best when it considers the shell of a man its hero has become; the ways that war and violence have become a part of his being, and what that has done to him. Stallone is patient with Rambo, and sympathetic. It's a thoughtful and worthy send-off.
