dir: Sylvester Stallone
Some things are just unbelievable, even when you see them with your
own eyes. I had heard the level of violence in this film described to
me by a friend, but even then I had no idea just how incredibly
violent it would be.
This is one of the first times I've watched a flick with war footage
where I seriously think actual war footage wouldn't be as graphic and
violent. Just think of that irony: an actual war would be less violent
than hopefully the last flick in this holy franchise.
Oh sure, all the Rambo films have been violent, but that violence,
viewed now, of a mannequin of a camp commandant being blown apart by
an exploding arrow, or the torture of numerous poor shmucks at the
hands of America's enemies, seems positively quaint in comparison. Ah,
the wonders of modern technology.
I'm not sure how this works, but we went from First Blood, to Rambo
II: Electric Boogaloo, to Rambo III to this latest flick, titled
Rambo. No, we haven't gone back in time. No, you don't have to go
through the misery of high school and your first humiliating sexual
encounters again.
For many of us, Rambo is an aspect of our past best kept there, much
like the other legacies of the 80s such as bad hairstyles, stupid
fingerless gloves and acid wash jeans. The image is of an incredibly
muscled, red bandana wearing crazy person clutching a very big gun. He
stood for a lot of things, including the lost pioneer spirit of rugged
individualism, the loss of innocence through the Vietnam War, and what
taking too many steroids can do to a man. Mostly, from the first film
to the third, he went from being a dark part of America's psyche to
being a beacon of American exceptionalism.
He starts off a wounded, traumatised product of not just the Vietnam
war, but of the shabby treatment meted out by the American government
and public upon the Nam veteran's return. By the second film, he's
undoing America's shame at losing the Vietnam war by getting revenge
on the scum keeping John McCain and other POWs hostage. In the third
he was effectively supporting the State Department's foreign policy
objectives by helping out Omar Sharrif and the other mujahadeen
freedom fighters in Afghanistan trying to repel the Soviet invaders.
The delicious irony of it. I must have missed the touching deleted
scene where John Rambo hugs a certain Bin Laden and tells his to stay
in touch via being pen pals later on. Not to put too fine a point on
it, but the second and third installments are pretty crappy films. Not
crappy by the standards of mindless action blockbusters, but bad
compared to, say, other actual films.
This fourth one is something of an enigma. It is one of the most
gratuitously violent films ever committed to celluloid, but it just
seems unlikely that Stallone did it just for the sake of doing it.
He's not hard up for money, and seems to have no problem purchasing
all the Human Growth Hormone and embryonic stem cells he desires. And
his most recent film, Rocky Balboa, was also a moderate critical and
financial success, against all logic and sense of human decency.
It can't be a coincidence that he's decided to cap off his two most
well known characters in such a way. A sixth Rocky film, which no-one
in the world wanted, is called Rocky Balboa, depicting him again as
the eternal underdog. A fourth film about Rambo is just called Rambo.
Is it a reversion to the basics, a return to form, a pared-down,
purified restating of who and what these characters stand for?
Who knows what demonic forces battle it out within Stallone's skull.
On the one hand he seemed to want to leave the world with a positive,
uplifting message of contemporary relevance from his most 'loveable'
character. And now he seems to want to leave the world with the
impression that his days and nights, his dreams and nightmares, are
soaked in the blood of the innocent and the viscera of the guilty.
Rambo clearly is still damaged from, um, stuff. In the twenty or so
years since he last saw action, he seems to have been perfectly
content operating a boat and catching cobras on the Thai-Burma border.
He looks and acts even more like a parody of Frankenstein's monster
than ever before. Every line of dialogue is grunted out like someone
is twisting a knife in his belly every time he speaks. For him there
are no light moments, no rainbows, no pleasure or respite from the
grim misery that is his tormented existence.
At the film's very beginning, in case we had no idea what we were
getting into, actual news footage of slaughter and butchery by the
Burmese military against civilians, monks and Karen rebels suffuse the
screen. As an entry point, I have to say I was sickened even before
Stallone's strained countenance graced the screen.
Grimly resolved to living his life in virtual isolation, Rambo is
approached by some American missionaries who demand that he take them
up river into Burma so they can deliver prayer books and medical care
to the mostly Christian rebels. Rambo gruntingly refuses, until an
attractive blonde missionary (Julie Benz) asks him nicely. They argue
back and forth in what constitutes an ethical debate for this film's
purposes, being Missionary Girl's position that they have to help
where they can, and Rambo's position being "Fuck the World."
When he said that I had a flashback to an old t-shirt I remember from
legendary Melbourne punk band Bastard Squad that had an image of a
brutish thug with his pants around his ankles actually fucking the
world. Then of course I juxtaposed Stallone into the graphic. Now
you've had a glimpse into the ugly, erratic nightmare landscape that
is the inside of my head, let alone Stallone's. At least I'm not going
to make films about it.
Eventually, being around a blonde white woman softens up his stoic
demeanour long enough for him to agree to take them where they want to
go upriver, making you wonder when Martin Sheen, Lawrence Fishburn and
Marlon Brando are going to turn up. Their passage upriver is
interrupted by the first of many threats of rape that Rambo greats
with customary tact by killing everyone and burning the bodies.
In case you think the flick is capable of nuance or subtlety, Rambo is
constantly pushed, at first, into situations where to not kill people
would result in innocent people dying. He is criticised for this by
the missionaries, who, being people who only have sex in one position,
are understandably na=EFve about how the world works.
Because this is what the film, when it's not annihilating large groups
of people, boils down to: the luxury of idealism and faith, and its
uselessness in the face of the brutality of evil men.
And boy are these Burmese evil. Stallone is worried that audiences
won't sufficiently feel justified when he starts killing them in large
numbers, so he has them perpetrating every outrage that most people
could ever imagine or ever want to imagine on innocent people. When
Burmese soldiers aren't forcing villagers to run through minefields
and then shooting those who don't explode in vivid bursts of
bloodspray and flying limbs as a reward, they're raping villagers,
throwing children into fires, raining down mortar fire on women and
children, using napalm for laughs and feeding missionaries to pigs
whilst they're still alive.
If that wasn't enough, and I assure you it was, before what has to be
the ultimate slaughter, just in case audiences didn't sufficiently
hate the villains of the piece enough, he has a whole group of
soldiers terrorising some kidnapped female villagers by forcing them
to dance and then gang raping them, all whilst the camp commander
molests a teenage boy.
I'm surprised there wasn't a scene where they sodomise the Pope with a
statue of the Virgin Mary whilst eating foetus burgers and wiping
their mouths on the American flag.
Technology is where the real advance has occurred, clearly not in
Stallone or Rambo's thinking. CGI, and the will to use it, is what
makes it affordable and, I guess desirable for Stallone to have so
many people die in the nastiest ways possible. Gunshots don't just
fell soldiers and villagers alike: they amputate limbs, completely
remove heads or practically annihilate people so that they are little
more than a bloody rain when their body parts hit the ground. Even the
relatively 'harmless' gunshots from AK-47s, let alone the 50 calibre
guns, blow holes the size of watermelons in people. All of this is
rendered with such attention and such clear intention to make it as
graphic and as extreme as possible that you seriously wonder what is
going through Stallone's hormone-addled head.
Although, I have to say, there were times where I thought that maybe
Rambo was the darkest comedy ever made.
Sure, there's no implication that Rambo isn't a hero, but he's
probably the nastiest rendering, the least sympathetic American action
'hero' that we're ever likely to see. Stallone doesn't have the
complexity of concept to think about whether Rambo is a figure even
more monstrous than the villains, but he is certainly a monstrous
figure to the audience. I know plenty of people would still want to
pump their fists in the air and bellow USA! USA! USA!, but honestly,
the bodies being put through the visual meat grinder, and the maniacal
fury with which Rambo dispatches his opponents, should really have the
opposite effect on sane, healthy people.
It's hard to discount or completely dismiss the movie as an exercise
in transgression, as a harkening back to a simpler, gentler time when
violence for violence's sake was more accepted. And I'm not
comfortable dismissing Stallone's return to this character as some
twisted neo-conservative argument for military intervention in places
like Burma, Darfur, Kenya or Byron Bay. The news footage used at the
beginning, manipulative as it is, is a keen reminder that as ludicrous
as a film this violent is, there are atrocities occurring like this
daily. The Burmese military junta has perpetrated countless violations
and horrors on the Burmese people, Karen tribespeople and plenty of
others. This stuff does happen, and it isn't stopped with the best of
intentions and noblest of wishes.
He doesn't present a solution that any sane person would accept
(beyond 'kill them all'), but he does understand the cathartic
aesthetic value of destruction, and what he thinks audiences want to
get from a Rambo movie. Part of me imagines a death cult now arising
in some corner of South-East Asia where worshippers build shrines and
make bloody offerings to Rambo the Destroyer. Shiva, Kali and Jesus
would have nothing on him. Stranger things have happened.
I can't recommend the flick to anyone, even gorehounds, but it makes
for surreal, repellent, repugnant, compelling viewing. It's the kind
of flick the military will be showing its recruits in training for
decades to come. And that's a seal of approval if there ever was one.
7 instances in which I just could not believe what I was seeing out of
10
--
"You didn't kill for your country... you killed for yourself." - Rambo
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