Rambo

The opening credits say "A Film by Sylvester Stallone," and I know we're not speaking the same language. This movie is brutal, far more brutal than I expected going in. The violence is kinetic, with blood and whatever else is inside of people exploding out of them visibly and with such velocity that it all disappears, a mist, into the air in seconds.

At least, that's about all I remember of this movie and it just ended about half an hour ago. There also were some slow parts when Sylvester Stallone's face kind of sat there on the screen looking like he must have suffered a stroke (did he? I don't remember hearing about that...) at some point in the past, and once he said, "Fuck the world," and I think maybe he meant it. Later it appears that Stallone has stopped trying to portray a human character at all and has instead decided to portray some kind of Tyrannosaurus, or perhaps he's upset he didn't get to play Kong and that dweeby Andy Serkis guy did so he's showing Peter Jackson where he went wrong? Of course, King Kong was a far more expressive and sympathetic character than John Rambo is.

Right after the climactic battle (I saw this band play a while ago called "Health" who basically stood around on stage and screamed and hit their instruments with as much demonstrative force as they could manage; the battle scenes in this movie were pretty much the movie equivalent of that) the blonde actress lady looks up at Rambo from among the dead bodies and cries, but not really as part of the story I don't think, like not that she was crying because she just witnessed a disgusting bloodbath after being trapped in a cage for several weeks and presumably raped a lot of times, it seemed as if she were crying along with us, the audience, as some kind of final giving up to John Rambo, as if he'd just spent ninety minutes screaming in our faces that we say "Uncle" and we finally did even though we weren't really sure why he came up to and started doing that in the first place. Obviously, this time it was because I paid the man $9.50 to do it. But still...

And what of using a real-life human rights atrocity as the stage for this movie? Is Stallone trying to raise awareness? It seemed kind of cheap to me, because ultimately the movie isn't about actually ending the genocide of the Karen people, it's just about how missionaries shouldn't go in there because they'll get killed and raped, and then a bunch of annoyed macho dudes will have to go and kill a bunch of people to save them (and in the final moments of the film apparently Rambo has come home to where his dad lives (comically, the mailbox says "R. Rambo," which I couldn't help but pronounce in my head), so any character development that happens certainly doesn't involve Rambo learning to become conscious of the world around him and of his ability to have an effect on the bad things that are happening but instead of him learning to be an ordinary American who wants to reconcile with his parents). The Karen people were pretty much just props, fodder for the games of the bad guys so we wouldn't feel at all conflicted when John Rambo tears their throats out with his bare hands or cuts open their bellies so their intestines fly out of them while they roll down hills. Sure, it's cathartic after watching the brutal shit they were doing, but Rambo and his mercenary compatriots (not friends; Rambo can't have friends) didn't stick around to try save the Karen girls who were getting gang raped. They only cared about saving the blond missionary girl and her missionary friends. Although, really, they didn't care about saving them that much either, I don't think. Rambo has this flashback where he decides that he's just a killer, so I think ultimately he's using the blond girl as a convenient excuse to kill a bunch of people, is the point. I guess you kind of have to give Stallone credit for making a mainstream Hollywood movie with this bleak of a basic view of the world, if you feel like you should give people credit for things like that.

I stuck around for most of the closing credits, just to see if Stallone actually walked all the way down that dirt road to that farm house, and he kind of did; at the end he turned away from the farm house and disappeared behind a tree. I was wondering first of all if that really was Stallone who made that walk or if they hired a guy to do it. Also, that in some way the fact that he's walking down the dirt road to his dad's house after being gone for over twenty years, twenty years of absolutely no contact, that the walk leading up to that reunion was in it's own (less violent) way just as dramatic a thing as anything else portrayed in the movie, but that we're so disinterested in any actual human part of Rambo that the actual scene of that happening is just used as the flat backdrop for the final credits to roll over. Maybe Rambo 5 will be John Rambo taking care of his father as his mind and body deteriorate but he refuses to leave his isolated farm? And they learn to love each other again or something?

Die Hard 4 was certainly much more fun than this, but I have a feeling I'm going to remember the sheer visceral feeling of being at this movie way more than I remember that one.

I remember pretending to be Rambo when I was a kid a lot, but I don't know if I actually remember ever seeing any of the Rambo movies. Say what you will about Stallone, but he's portrayed (and in the case of Rocky, actually created) two characters whose names have entered the ordinary lexicon of Americans. "Rambo" is in the fucking OED, which is more than you could say for John McClane.

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The ending credit scene is actually kind of ambivalently poetic if you imagine that as Rambo is making the slow walk down the gravel road to the country house nestled in the country hills of rural America the names scrolling up beside him, such as "Karen Naked Girl" along with the names of all the actors who played the kids who get asploded that its like those names are an actual manifestation of Rambo's conscience or of some aspect of his consciousness, reminding him of what he left behind in Burma in order to fulfill his self-centered desire to see "what's changed" back in America.