Rambo (2008)

Of all the killer Movie Gods of the 1980s, Sylvester Stallone was always the most disarmingly poignant. Schwarzenegger’s casting as a robot was all too apt, and Bruce Willis doesn’t count because he’s an authentically great actor who managed to escape the ghetto. I never believed Stallone in kill crazy mode though, he’s too vulnerable and, at times, too funny; funnier than people have ever given him credit for. Oscar is maligned, and I never understood why. Demolition Man is, intentionally, quite funny. Even an unintentional howler like Tango and Cash has moments, primarily due to Stallone’s chemistry with Kurt Russell. Stallone isn’t an actor, but he’s a non-actor in a more personal way than a Schwarzenegger, any evident technique would ruin a Stallone performance. Stallone is a raw nerve: pure, unchanelled, unchecked empathy. Stallone is his characters, and his films, even the ones not called Rocky, are his shot at some sort of self-salvage, his reckoning.

And he’s canny. Rocky Balboa worked, despite some major problems, because the actor was humble and witty enough to make the character a surrogate Stallone again, which we hadn’t seen since Rocky II. Rocky III and Rocky IV were absurd even by the standards of the 1980s, Stallone’s desperate bid to trump the little man’s syndrome that he apparently suffers from, and Rocky V? I don’t know what the hell that was, but I think it was some sort of mutant offspring of both good and bad Rocky movies, Stallone’s attempt to scale back and hunker down, but the results were stillborn. Balboa got the formula right again, and was an unexpected financial and critical success.

Which brings us the inevitable Rambo rebirth a year and some change later, called, logically, unavoidably, Rambo, the various titlings of previous films in the series having become too convoluted to render any another option conceivable. Fourth Blood: Rambo Part III? Rambo IV: First Blood Part IV? All of that nonsense has been abandoned, and for the good. Is the movie itself any good? Or, more appropriately, does it satisfy the standards of the series and the genre? The film isn’t much good, and you can’t shrug off the crumminess of the Rambo movies in the same way that you can some of the Rockys. Rocky was a good-hearted lunk. Rambo is a more irresponsible shoot first, someone else asks questions later kind of guy. I don’t preach for responsibility in the movies, that’s the first and best way to kill their livelihood, but I’ve always thought that the Rambo movies were tasteless; their reliance on real issues and tragedies as shorthand for any dramatic heft tacky.

The old Rambos utilized the Vietnam war; the new Rambo is concerned with the issue in Burma, and Stallone opens his film with, I think, real footage of the atrocities the people are actually suffering over there. My sensors sounded a bit, this in the service of a just another revenge movie? Why? Stallone the director continues to ladle on the mistreatment in the grimy, largely boring opening half. Burmese=disease. Rambo=cure.

There’s still something to Stallone though, and he has a clunkiness that will haunt you. In his fourth gig as Rambo, Stallone looks worse than Mickey Rourke and that is truly saying something. Stallone seems to be suffering from some sort of EC comics style ironic punishment. You want to be big? You’ll be big! Stallone is as big as a diesel truck here, a wax Frankenstein monster that has finally, totally, retreated into his headspace.

But, like the monster, he’s susceptible to the charms of a pretty woman, and, by about the fifty minute mark, it’s go time. The second half of Rambo demonstrates that Stallone understands this series’ appeal as intimately as he does Rocky. Rambo is pure, primal id, and the second half, really just one long climax, has a garish, bloody, absurd power; with bullets the size of stakes tearing holes in people that the South Park boys would envy.

So, yes, Rambo does, ultimately, work by the standards of the genre, and it does convincingly resurrect the violent, lurid, un-PC MO of the 1980s action movies. I still think it represents Stallone playing counter to his gifts, but my opinion doesn’t trump box office dollars. That’s a boggle for another day.

★★½

Posted on January 28th, 2008 in Reviews, Action, 2008 |

© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress.