Rambo's Burmese Days

For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to see the new Rambo movie last night. After seeing some commercials, I had high hopes that it would take cinematic self-parody to new heights. I was disappointed. It was so bad that it couldn't even find a way to make fun of itself. But at least that gives me the opportunity to make fun of it here.

Since we last saw him fighting on the side of forces that would later go on to become the Taliban in Rambo III, our man has retreated to a small riverside village in Thailand to scowl at everyone, make barely audible grunting sounds and wrangle deadly poisonous snakes for a living. This all changes when a small group of sanctimonious Christian do-gooders shows up and ruins everything. They want to get into Burma to bring aid to the Karen ethno-religious minority, which has been brutally repressed by the Burmese government for the past 60 years, and Rambo is apparently the only one who has both the boat and the know-how to get them up-river into that bloody warzone. After refusing initial entreaties by the group's leader, the only female member of the group eventually manages to convince Rambo to help them. Once they get into Burma, all hell breaks loose. Seemingly minutes after they arrive in a Karen village, Burmese troops lay waste to the village, kill lots of people and take the activists hostage. The church group's pastor finds out about this turn of events and pays Rambo and a bunch of mercenaries to rescue them. And that's when the sparks really begin to fly.

The basic message underlying the plot is the argument that the only thing that changes anything in this world is the application of large amounts of gratuitous violence. Call it the Rambo Doctrine. When the God Squadders approach Rambo for assistance at the beginning of the movie, he asks them if they are bringing weapons into Burma with them. Of course they're not, and in response, Rambo grunts "you're not changin' anything." After Rambo singlehandedly dispatches a group of Burmese pirates on the way into country, the group's annoying leader tells Rambo "I know you think what you did is right, but killing people is never right." At this moment you know that in about an hour, Mr. Christian Pacifist will have blood on his hands. Indeed, after one of his crew is killed in an attack, he bashes some guy's head in with a rock. Rambo grunts in approval. This is the movie that should have been called There Will Be Blood, not the latest P.T. Anderson flick.

Indeed, this is likely the most violent movie I've ever seen in the theater. Long, highly stylized massacre sequences dominate the movie, in which entire heads get blown off, guts are ripped out of bellies with enormous serrated knives and at one point Rambo even rips out a guy's throat with his bare hands. All of this gore is shocking at first, but then it becomes curiously boring because this is what the entire movie basically consists of when the characters aren't engaging in poorly written and stilted dialogue that isn't even unintentionally funny. It's just plain horrible. However, high comic relief is provided when Rambo somehow manages to take out an entire Burmese army unit with a single Claymore anti-personnel mine, creating a small mushroom cloud and destroying a huge swath of rainforest! And who can forget about the scene where he forges a machete out of a single piece of rebar? Hands down these were the two best parts of the movie.

Stallone's directing is also unbelievably terrible at times. When Rambo and his men sneak into the Burmese army base to rescue the missionaries, you can't really tell who is doing what at any given time. Is that Rambo sliding under the hut to free the hot hippie chick from being raped incessantly by the screaming one-dimensional Asian stereotypes? No, I think it was the mildly retarded Southern guy. Wait, it could have been the snarky British dude or perhaps even the cute and cuddly British dude. All you need to know is that they somehow manage to go undetected, escape and the next day Rambo kills the entire unit by standing on the back of a jeep with a huge machine gun. Problem solved. Rambo then apparently walks home to his family's ranch in Arizona and the movie ends. You don't even get to see him reunite with his family because that would require, you know, writing some dialogue and acting it out.

I guess I have to give Sly props for brazenly tying the legitimately horrendous plight of the Karen people to his paean to violent military intervention. I thought that since the overwhelming majority of Americans have come to reject the Bush administration's murderous and criminal intervention in Iraq, it would be a while before anyone tried to bring something like this to the theaters. Perhaps the utter stupidity of this movie will remind some moviegoers of the utter stupidity of trying to bring change to other people's countries through the use of force. But that's probably asking too much of this movie. Just try to enjoy the part where he blows up the jungle with the mine.