Rambo: They Just Keep Getting Stupider...

Last night, I decided to while away the last waking hours of the weekend by sitting down with a couple slices of pizza and watching Rambo. (It was a banner night for high-culture.) This was my first viewing.

As I watched the end credits scroll up the screen, I found myself in a quandary. How could I string together a single, descriptive phrase using the words 'excessive', 'stupid', 'superficial', 'ludicrous', 'gratuitous' and 'violent', without coming across like I'd completely gone on adverb safari?

In the end, this is what I came up with:

Rambo is quite possibly the most excessively superficial, stupidly ludicrous and gratuitously violent movie I have ever seen.

I know. What the hell was I expecting? I'd seen all three previous movies in the series, so I knew that after First Blood, each movie got progressive dumber and more violent. I'd read that the body count in this movie surpassed the counts in all three previous movies combined. I wasn't going into this blind. I can tell you that I pressed 'Play' fully expecting a stupid, superficial and violent movie. However, I didn't quite expect all those aspects to be ratcheted-up to eleven.

How is the movie stupid and superficial? The plot deals with the Burmese Army. The Burmese Army is bad. How do we know they are bad? Because they like killing people. Boy, do they like killing people. But, before they kill people, they might rape them too. And not just the women. When it was revealed that the evil leader of the Burmese Army battalion enjoyed the company of little boys, I nearly snorted juice through my nose. Did I mention the leader was evil? I suppose that because the bad guys perpetrated such insane violence upon the poor Burmese villagers (and misguided, pacifist Christian aid-workers), that it was some sort of karmic justice when Rambo revisited the same type of insane violence upon them.

Now, I have no problem with explicit violence in movies, when I can see the purpose. The storming of Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan did a masterful job of showcasing the horrors of war, and adding an unspoken urgency to a plot revolving around the extraction of a soldier from that war. The over-the-top violence in both Robocop and Starship Troopers were just part of the overall satire found in both Verhoeven movies.

In Rambo, the violence was just wanton. The movie was only ninety minutes, but my viewing lasted nearly two hours. I kept rewinding the damn movie every time I had a 'Did they really just show that?' moment. So much of the violence was completely unnecessary. It's like Stallone had enough plot for a sixty-minute movie, and needed to flesh things out. There are at least two ten-minute scenes in the movie where nothing happens except that people die in the most graphic ways possible. Decapitations. Disembowelment. Limbs being blown off. People getting shot with arrows. People getting shot with machine guns. People getting shot by freaking 50mm cannons. People exploding into giblets. Literally blood and guts everywhere.

My brother caught this movie in the theatres. When I was talking to him afterwards, he reiterated what all the reviews were saying. The movie was violent. But what he also mentioned was that there was this one scene that was so over the top that it felt like the entire audience collectively sat up in their seats and went, "Woah." Remembering his comments, I was on the lookout for that scene.

When I finished the movie, I had no idea which scene Ken was talking about. Because there wasn't a single scene that had me going, "Woah."; there were at least four. The graphic nature of the violence is just that ridiculous.

Sylvester Stallone has already confirmed that Rambo V is in pre-production. For some masochistic reason, I'll probably feel compelled to watch that too.

Oy.