Rambo

More of a sketch for the real thing rather than anything substantial in itself, Rambo is Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to give his other iconic character a fitting send off. But whereas Rocky Balboa was a film about a character who had reached a peace with his life, Rambo fumbles in trying to show the process whereby a character can reach this zen state.

It’s not that the film doesn’t try, but the way it does it is didactic and uninspired. The lines don’t flow organically from the characters mouths but instead sound like a bunch of slogans strung together. And some of the set-ups are painfully obvious. A missionary who tells Rambo off for killing some pirates who were going to kill them with the line “Killing is never right” is obviously going to kill someone before the end. And the hammy tortured look on his face is laughable as he does it. There’s no grief in the death of his ideal just overacted incredulity.

There’s plenty of material in the film suggesting that Stallone intended better. The basic struggle of Rambo to reconcile his nature as a trained killer with his desire to live at peace with the world and himself, the ideals of religion mixed with the reality of a broken world, the horrors of war, it’s all there for a truly great work of cinema. Instead we get a bunch of trite homilies and self-evident statements before Rambo cuts loose with the giant machine gun and churns your stomach with enough shredded limbs to move beyond the horrific to the cartoonishly comical.

First Blood was a brilliant film about a man broken by war and abused by his country. This attempt to tie off the story of John Rambo fails in so many ways it’s just sad. It’s never boring, the action is expertly handled and thrilling, but it never manages to mean anything the way that its lame dialogue is so clearly trying to. A shadow of a greater work, Rambo is a big disappointment.

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