By Kofi Outlaw

The most surprising thing about RAMBO is that it isn’t the shoe-in for the 2008 Razzie Award like a lot of us thought it would be. The fourth installment of the “First Blood” franchise is actually a pretty faithful throwback to the “man-movie” action flicks of the 80’s and early 90’s, such over-the-top testosterone romps like DIE HARD, or LETHAL WEAPON, which would never play in our modern, femme-powered culture. The second most surprising thing about RAMBO, then, is how the film deftly (although inadvertently) demonstrates how outdated the “man-movie” action hero is.

The plot of RAMBO is as simple as to be expected: ex-war-machine John Rambo has retired from the battlefield, living out his days as a ferryman along the rivers of South East Asia. One day a group of idealistic American missionaries stumble into Rambo’s village, looking for passage up-river into war-torn Burma. Rambo tries to convince the foolish zealots to turn back, but they persist until Rambo agrees to cart them.

On the way to Burma, the would-be saviors witness Rambo dispatch a boatful of pirates, who would have otherwise killed them all, kidnapped the one woman in their party, and done unspeakable things with her, before they killed her as well. The missionaries are horrified at Rambo’s savagery, getting in his face about peace, non-violence, and turning the other cheek, even as they depart the boat and trek into Burma.

All that peace talk goes out the window the minute the Burmese army shows up at the village the missionaries are camped in, and slaughter EVERYONE. The one girl, Sarah, gets captured along with the loudest mouth among the missionaries (24’s Paul Schulze), and they are taken to a Burmese base camp as POWs awaiting a terrible fate.


The church soon comes looking for its missing members, a search which leads them to Rambo. Ol’ Johnny boy is recruited to once again make the trek up to Burma, this time to deliver an international team of mercenaries onshore, so that they can locate the missing Americans. Feeling guilty, Rambo follows the mercenaries into the jungle, and soon they have a bead on the where the missionaries are being held.

The Burmese army faction is led by a soulless (and nameless) commander, who enjoys making prisoners relay race across marshes peppered with mines, and occupies his evenings buggering little boys in the privacy of his hut. It is this kind of hell-on-earth that Rambo and company stumble into in the dead of night. With the help of some Burmese rebels, they liberate the missionaries, a few other doomed prisoners, and take off into the jungle to escape on Rambo’s boat.

Of course the plan goes down the drain, the army takes off after them in hot pursuit, and Rambo and the mercs must make a final stand against overwhelming forces.

RAMBO is not a film for the faint of heart. If you haven’t already seen the red-band trailer, this is a VIOLENT film (and I mean that in caps.) Beheading, disemboweling, disintegration, dismemberment; if it is fatal to the human body, this film has it to such an excessive degree that the camera is at times obstructed by all the blood. Bodies are shredded to bits by gunfire, grenades, knives, machetes, arrows, boulders, flame-throwers, RPGs, and one rusted bomb left over from WWII. I have to say thought, the action is filmed pretty well, and Sly continues to demonstrate that he at least knows how to hold a camera as a director. I definitely haven’t experienced this kind of visceral killjoy since my mother took me to see DIE HARD 2 when I was nine years old.

We’ll touch on briefly on the acting. Sly gives his usual mush-mouth, droopy-faced performance, delivering atrocious lines (which are already counted amongst the classic cinematic soliloquies,) such as “When you’re pushed, killing is as easy as breathing.” Ouch. The mercenaries, with their smart-mouthed banter, are a welcome foil to Sly’s weary scowl (good idea to include them and flesh-out the story a bit.) The Burmese soldiers and the unfortunate villagers are basically just an “ethnic backdrop” exploited like livestock in an abattoir—which explains why the story is set in Burma. Muslim groups would’ve STILL been be outside theaters in a picket line, had this film been set in Middle East.


However Sly (wisely?) avoids going the pro-America stance, offering an impartial “meditation” on the universal horrors of unchecked warfare. I’ll let you be the judge of whether or not he succeeds in delivering that blood-soaked message. All I know, is that by the end credits, when our hero is making that last long walk into the sun, (dressed in stone-washed jeans straight out of the 80’s,) you’re left with the unsettling notion that this dog has perhaps, at long last, had all the day he will ever have. All in all though, RAMBO is a going-away party that could’ve been twice as lame than it is. And in this case, that’s saying a lot.