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By MIKE THOMAS
How violent is Sylvester Stallone’s new “Rambo” film? Put it this way: If you were to make it a drinking game and then take a slug of booze each time someone buys the farm, you’d become either monstrously drunk or possibly dead yourself from alcohol poisoning by the time the end credits roll.
Beheadings, disembowelment, exploding bodies, decomposing bodies, raping, torturing, hanging — you name the most depraved level of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman and children), and it’s most likely represented onscreen.
As one dude told his buddy after a recent showing, “That was by far the goriest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Then there was a smattering of applause.
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After American missionaries enlist his services to guide them up the
Salween River in northern Thailand (where Rambo now lives, catching
fish and snakes) to a village in volatile, military-ruled Burma (aka
Myanmar), things go awry.
When a Burmese junta obliterates the village one sunny afternoon, the
missionaries are taken hostage. Concerned because he hasn’t heard from
them in 10 days, their pastor asks Rambo to transport hired mercenaries
upriver to save the do-gooders. He obliges.
The sole female missionary, a bold, blond and good-hearted woman named
Sarah Miller (Julie Benz), becomes, in effect, his damsel in distress.
And she may have actually gotten through to him.
For as it turns out, Rambo does care about something: killing. Everyone
has some sort of skill or talent, and homicidal rampages are what he
does best. “You know what you are, you know what you’re made of,” he
tells himself. “War is in your blood.”
“Rambo” has its share of such slap-you-upside-the-head proclamations.
Then again, dialogue is hardly the focus here. In much the same way
that it serves to break up sex scenes in pornography, the lines are
mostly just exposition and filler. You might even say “Rambo” is
violence porn. Well-shot and well-edited violence porn, but violence
porn, nonetheless.
Upon wreaking havoc on the Burmese army and rescuing the surviving
church folks, Rambo commits what may well be his final act of savagery.
Then he returns home to his family’s farm in the States, and the film’s
final pastoral scene seems to convey, lives happily ever after. So what
if he’s an unrepentant murdering machine? So what if war is in his
blood? Maybe, at long last, he’s finally at peace with himself.
And you’ve gotta love a fairy-tale ending.
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Mike Thomas is an entertainment reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times.
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