“Rambo” Movie Review
In 2006, Sylvester Stallone sent Rocky off in a film that brought the character, and the series, full circle. Not only that, it was a chance for him to play this beloved character one last time. A character that, as Stallone has put it in many interviews, is a lot like him. Stallone wanted to do the exact same thing with Rambo. He felt that there was one more chapter to this stunning character’s life and, thus, needed to be told. “Rambo” most certainly delivers on all fronts and is the most gruesome film in the franchise.
The movie starts off with snippets of news broadcasts from around the globe talking about the Burmese genocide that has been taking place for the last sixty years. A civil war that is the longest recorded in human history. Next is a scene where the violent militia of Burma (Myanmar) unloads a group of innocent civilians they’ve captured from a village near a rice paddy. One of the soldiers takes a couple of land mines and throws them into the paddy. The civilians are thrown into the paddy and are told to run across it. The frightened people run and then become extremely terrified when one of them steps on a mine and is blown to bits. They stop in their tracks and are told to proceed. When they refuse to go on, out of sheer terror, they are, then, gunned down and left to rot in the paddy. The RAMBO title, then, appears.
We find Rambo in a jungle collecting snakes for a local Thai businessman. Upon his return he’s chewed out by his buyer that he buys more cobras than he needs and is wanting pythons. Rambo tells him to fuck-off and proceeds to feed some of the captured snakes and to clean up.
Missionaries, shortly after, show up asking him if he can take them up river into Burma. Rambo tells them Burma is a warzone but the missionaries are adamant about getting up to some villages to bring food and medicine to the locals. Rambo walks off tell them he can’t help them. The missionaries are prepared to look for someone else until the only female in the group, Sarah, tells Michael, the head of the missionary group, to give her a chance to talk to Rambo. After several attempts, Rambo agrees to drop them off.; refusing to take any sort of payment.
On their way up into Burma, a group of Burmese pirates stops them and wants Sarah and threatens to kill everyone on the boat. Rambo makes a quick move and shoots them all down. Michael is not happy with what has taken place and chews Rambo out. Rambo, then, grabs Michael by the throat and tells him they all would have died if he hadn’t done anything about it.
After dropping them off at a safe point, Rambo turns and heads home. What follows, next, is the small village the missionaries end up in gets attacked and what ensues are very grisly images of the Burma militia slaughtering everybody regardless of age. Babies are taken from their mothers’ arms and thrown into the fires, children are either shot or cut to pieces, others are blown to bits, shot, or cut up as well.
When Rambo is notified of the kidnapping by the pastor responsible for sending the missionaries over, Rambo gets pissed and is determined to save the sole surviving missionaries. What ensues is rescue mission that ends up having the tyrannical militia go after Rambo and the mercenaries and a giant bloodbath.
As one reviewer put it, “‘RAMBO’ makes the three previous films look like ‘Enchanted.’” I have to fully agree with that. Rambo is very pessimistic about people and the ability for people to make a difference without the use of any weaponry. The violence us upped, dramatically, from anything I’ve seen in any movie and the scenes involving women being sexually assaulted and the children getting maimed is truly disturbing. Of course, so is seeing everyone else getting maimed in the most brutal, and realistic, fashion I’ve ever seen on screen.
Your heart goes out to those in Burma after seeing this film. It’s, literally, a shame that most, including myself, have not known about this awfully violent civil war that has been waging in the country for the last sixty years.
“Rambo” is a movie that 1) people who love action movies will love and 2) everyone should see because of the current situation that is taking place over in the Burma region. However, a fair warning to everyone: If you get easily sickened by body parts getting chopped or blown off, people being decapitated, heads being shot at and blown off, and realistic violence of the most horrible extremes, don’t see the movie.
“Rambo” easily gets five out of five stars from me.
Extreamly fantastic movie seen by me so far, specially Rambo title brings all memories back to the 80s…I like the movie. There is no doubt his the man..in sitting in 60s of age still capable. I have give him 5****. Thats all I wanna say. If you really wanna see whats really good in this movie, go and watch.
Thanks
Sid