Philadelphia Weekly

It would probably feel more at home on a cruddy VHS tape with bad tracking problems--so thorough is the Proustian wayback-machine sensation of watching Rambo, Sylvester Stallone's sad, batshit-violent, unasked-for return to his second-most-famous screen incarnation. It's a grotesque cheapie throwback to those grisly late-period grindhouse movies from the 1980s, all but begging to be programmed on a Times Square double bill with The Exterminator series.

Much like Rocky Balboa, John Rambo entered the world as an interesting underdog character played strikingly well by Sylvester Stallone in a downbeat low-budget movie, only to morph into something disgusting during a series of opportunistic, politically noxious and ethically questionable sequels that only got worse as the star continued to exert more and more creative control.

Nobody's ever going to mistake Ted Kotcheff's First Blood for an art film, but it's still a surprisingly harsh, pulpy take on the same lonely, disenfranchised Vietnam vet saga that fueled everything from Paul Schrader's screenplays for Rolling Thunder and Taxi Driver to Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. album.

It wasn't until 1985--the same year Rocky Balboa won the Cold War by beating Dolph Lundgren's 'roid-raging, Apollo Creed-killing Ivan Drago--that John Rambo (with a helpful assist from Stallone's co-screenwriter James Cameron) went back to Vietnam with an M16 slung over his shoulder and answered the question Sly asked just before Rambo: First Blood Part II's opening credits literally burst into flames: "Do we get to win this time?"

I'm frankly stunned, considering Stallone's previous penchant for applying simplistic wish-fulfillment fantasies onto nationalistic sore spots, that Rambo doesn't end with him dropping Osama bin Laden's head into some CGI resurrection of Richard Crenna's lap. Alas, we'll just have to settle for Myanmar.

The Burmese army's relentless persecution of the Karen tribe is cause for much fetishization on Stallone's part. He lavishes endless loving close-ups on babies being bayoneted, women being sexually violated, men being tortured to death and fed to pigs--all building to the reflection of burning villages in the mirrored sunglasses of Muang Muang Khin's off-the-charts sadistic Burmese general. (We know this guy is extra evil because while his underlings are content to merely rape women, he rapes little boys.)

Is this a global wake-up call about underreported atrocities? No, more like an opportunistic excuse to make Rambo really, really mad. Which is not something you want to do ... like, ever.

It seems some kindly Christian missionaries from Colorado attempted to bring prayer books and medicine to the Karen locals. Rambo, now bow-hunting fish and living a simpler life without dialogue in Thailand, became chastely smitten with one of their idealistic leaders (Dexter's Julie Benz, carrying the brunt of the film's idealistic speeches while wearing a wet white tank top). Sixty years of civil war just went out the window. Those drooling Burmese bastards kidnapped the wrong white people and pissed off a former American movie star. Now there's hell to pay.

And what hell! Rambo has got to be one of the most violent movies ever made--the first half devoted to torture and degradation, and the second wallowing in horrific, bloody vengeance. I'm not sure anybody has ever spent quite as much time studying just what a .50-caliber machine gun can do to a human body at close range, but as the 61-year-old Stallone spends most of the movie perched behind this anti-aircraft weapon (a smart way of getting around doing any pesky stunts), we're treated to constant shots of immobile Sly literally shredding his antagonists. Entrails and severed limbs spew through the air, without even a token nod toward screen direction or spatial coherence.

I never had any idea where anybody was in relation to one another; I just knew they were all drenched in blood. In keeping with the film's reactionary blockheadedness, Paul Schulze's do-gooder preacher first lectures Rambo that "taking human life is wrong, under any circumstances!"

Any bets as to which character eventually winds up bashing a bad guy's head in with a rock, screaming in almost orgasmic ecstasy?

This rape-happy Rambo is amazingly disturbing and weirdly hung up on unsettling psychosexual flourishes.

In other words, Stallone is a lot like Mel Gibson, only without the talent.

Rambo
D+
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Starring: Sylvester Stallone
Now showing