THE first “Rambo” movie told the story of a shaggy-haired, peace-loving nature boy who questioned government officials, stood up to police brutality, ate locally and produced a miniscule carbon footprint. Why he didn’t become a liberal icon is a mystery. Must have been that American flag he wore on his fatigues.
“Rambo” 4.0, which opens today, finds John Rambo behaving more strangely than ever. He lives in Thailand, where he pilots a riverboat (possibly bought secondhand from Capt. Willard of “Apocalypse Now”) and is apparently top man in the lucrative cobra-catching industry.
When some human-rightsy types show up to gab about delivering medicine to impoverished minorities being oppressed by warlords in Burma, he asks, “Are you bringing in any weapons?” Of course not, he is told. “Then you’re not changing anything,” he says. Later, he will add, “F–k the world.”
It turns out Rambo’s hard-won bitterness can be softened by a two-minute Student Council speech (“Maybe you lost your faith in people, but you must still have faith in something . . .”) given by a blond do-gooder named Sarah (Julie Benz).
At this point, Rambo changes his mind and even decides to work for nothing. Soon he and his new pals are floating into darkest Burma. He doesn’t even say goodbye to his snakes.
Wrong as the current Burmese government is – pending their assassination in the next coup, the goons in charge have dubbed the country “Myanmar” – Sylvester Stallone, who co-wrote and directed, gives us no compelling reason why we, or Rambo, should be involved. This time, it’s impersonal.
Rambo is a solo artist. Yet here he joins a squad of mercenaries hired to rescue the human-rights workers who get themselves kidnapped. For a stretch of the movie, Rambo is reduced to hanging around in the background while the mercenaries twitter about their toughness.
Rambo is no Chatty Cathy, yet Stallone has him fairly yammering with exposition about the plight of the minority Karen people and the habits of Burmese pirates. He even pep talks the mercenaries, who want to turn back, with these words: “This is what we do. Who we are.” What’s with this “we” business, Coach Rambo? Stick to cobra collecting. Avoid motivational speaking.
Rambo needs no one, yet here, humiliatingly, he needs his bacon saved by the mercenaries. He then joins their team for a round of giga-violence rivaled, in my experience, only by an adolescent game called Smear the Queer (50 rampaging boys turned loose with the sole aim of inflicting pain on one another).
Heads are snicked off at long range by automatic weaponry. Bodies are broken, explosively, into flying cutlets. When being especially nice, the characters merely hack off one anothers’ limbs.
An element of exaggeration takes over. The humble Claymore mine – generally considered an effective way to mar the outlook of a dozen or two enemies at a time – is here presented as the kind of mushroom cloud-producing device that will set hammocks swaying in New Zealand.
All of this happens at a volume that made my cuffs vibrate in the breeze.
Needlessly violent? No, “Rambo” is needfully violent. Johnny R. is a man constructed of violence. He can no more do without firing arrows into skulls than a lady poet can do without her yoga. The psychological effects of his métier might be worth considering, but Stallone isn’t interested in anything but the next explosion.
I’m not saying I want Rambo to start seeing Dr. Friedman on Park and 85th every Tuesday and Thursday, but we love Rocky Balboa because he’s more than a punching machine. Rambo is no longer a symbol of betrayal in Vietnam or anything else. He’s just a walking Claymore.
RAMBO
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (strong graphic bloody violence, sexual assaults, grisly images, profanity). At the 84th Street, the Orpheum, the Magic Johnson, others.