Rambo (2008)

Stallone returned to this franchise, much as he did to the Rocky series in 2006, with a kind of epilog. The most reflective Rambo movie since the original finds our protagonist living in self imposed exile in Thailand, hunting poisonous snakes to be used in dubious ‘sporting’ competitions. Along comes a group of Christian aid workers from Colorado, who want to hire out Rambo and his boat to take them into war torn Burma, so as to service the persecuted Christian minority there. At first Rambo demurs, but a sincere, blond 6th grad teacher prevail upon him to act as there escort. Seeing them passed river pirates to their destination, Rambo leaves the naive Christians and returns to Thailand. Several weeks later the Christians pastor arrives with some mercenaries, he wants Rambo to fairy these hired strong man back into Burma to rescue his parishioners, who according to contacts in that countries resistance, have been taken hostage by the oppressive government. Rambo of course goes and end up saving some lives, but we’ve seen that before and that’s not what lends the movie its interest. The intriguing aspects of the film are two fold, 1) Rambo’s internal ‘spiritual’ reawakening brought on by that blond Christian, and leading ultimately to the series ending exactly the way it should; and 2) the intensity of the violence, even for a Rambo movie, and the films mediation on what that means.

To explore the second point further I refer to a sequence fairly early in the film. Rambo is transporting the Christians by night into Burma, they pass some nasty river pirates in the dark partying. Rambo tells the Christians to remain perfectly silent as their boats attempts to creep past unnoticed, this fails and they are besieged. Rambo tries to work something out with the pirates, they can take any money or supplies they want, but they are most interested in the blond. So, Rambo kills the pirates, thus preventing the rape of the young women, and the probably painful deaths of all the other missionaries. Now one of the missionaries, a doctor, protests this violence in the strongest terms, yet ultimately he was a supreme beneficiary of Rambo’s combat skills, in that he got to remain alive when he otherwise wouldn’t. So what do you do in a situation like this? It is the pacifist dilemma, what to do when violence is your only way to survive against the onslaught of pure evil? This is fairly waity for an action movie, and indeed so is the setting, highlighting the appalling and under reported situation in Myanmar. Stallone ratches up the violence to communicate this state of affairs, and it is affective, though rendered with digital effects that draw undo attention to there status as effects. Though I must complement how the main Burmese villain is that right kind of emotionally dead evil you expect from a war lord. I like were Stallone went with this film, though like the second Rambo it just seems lacking in places for the audience to emotionaly invest, we can be horrified by the carnage we see, but on a personal level the characters we are suppose to care for give us very little, much like Rambo in conversation. So a not fully realized though valiant effort, three out of five.