Relax – you're not time travelling. It is 2008, and retirement-ready Sylvester Stallone really is starring in another Rambo picture. Although it must be acknowledged that the star's lank raven hair, which presumably contains more chemicals than Lake Erie, doesn't look a day over 25.
Can anyone still be rooting for Rocky or Rambo? We all like to think we have a lottery ticket's chance at making it big, so the world cheered when Stallone's Rocky, a punching bag with spaniel eyes, took a haymaker swing at the big time and connected, becoming heavyweight champion of the movie world in 1976.
The actor's subsequent blockbusters, however, only served to expose the tyrant that lurks inside so many populist heroes. It wasn't enough that Sly's 5-foot-8-inch Rocky Balboa remained champ through 30 years and five additional, increasingly improbable movies. Stallone also became John Rambo and went on a killing spree – First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988). These were movies that gave revenge murder fantasy a brand name. Indeed, we now say mass murderers “go Rambo” when they explode.
Appallingly, as the series progressed, it began promoting violence as an aphrodisiac. Now, in its final episode, we are invited to enjoy watching Rambo kill an army of despicable Asian soldiers, to paraphrase Johnny Cash, just to watch them die.
It's been 20 years since Rambo was in action, so Stallone takes things slowly at first. Loosening up, the traumatized Vietnam vet, now a solitary boatman working Thailand's lazy rivers, wrestles cobras into a sack, then fires an arrow into torpid water, retrieving a fish dinner.
Christian human-rights missionaries appear, asking Rambo to ferry them into Burma, where they hope to dispense hope to the politically oppressed. We know what that means. Before the activists showed up, we saw government militia send villagers racing through rice paddies littered with land mines. Losers became pink explosions.
Rambo escorts the Christians upriver, where their boat is intercepted. One of Rambo's charges, a pretty liberal (Julie Benz) is about to be raped and her male colleagues beheaded, when – quick as a sneeze – Rambo whips out an automatic handgun and saws the bad guys in half.
And so it goes: The militia rape boys and girls, and feed their pigs enemies of the state, cackling all the while. Never, not even in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, has Hollywood depicted Asians with more prejudice. To what end? With the thugs' every foul deed, Rambo and a youthful band of vigilantes are aroused to a greater sense of fury, resulting in a final massacre that makes viewers feel as if they're in a sprinkler park raining blood.
All this from an actor Roger Ebert predicted would have a career the equal of Marlon Brando's. How sad is it to see 62-year-old Stallone, the film's writer-director, attempt to reach today's audience by partnering Rambo with allegedly hip kid vigilantes. A brief sample of their dialogue: “I've seen a lot of [expletive], but I've never seen [expletive] like this, man.”
