Rambo is better than Rambo : First Blood Part II, and Rambo III. Which is kind of like saying being punched in the face until you black out is better than having your foot sawn off by a hedgetrimmer.

Rambo is The Blacksploitation Flick of the Noughties. Twenty years after the monumentally stupid Rambo 3 (dedicated to the freedom fighters of Afghanistan - or the Taliban, to you and me) Sly packs his muscles and his glares up for a fourth, pointless installment in this ever-shrinking set of films.

Put bluntly, Rambo is 81 minutes of moronic nonsense, posturing under the guise of being a brave, revelatory political statement about oppression. Such justification is at best, a fairly desperate attempt to explain a film that is 40 minutes of insane and bloody violence, and 40 minutes of brooding and staring.



Make no mistake : its a pleasant relief to have an action film that is not only rated 18, but actually bloody deserves it. I'm tired and bored of sanitised CGI bullshit, and hyper-censored, gutless nonsense that deludes itself as an 'action' film. Most films are preposterous bollocks loaded with impossible physics and laughable moments.

The only thing about the film that is any good is the relatively realistic violence : bullet impacts decimate and the gore flows freer than any film that isn't called Freddy Vs Jason And The Chainsaw Vs The Teenage Virgins About To Die In Inventive Ways. After 80 minutes, and 284 onscreen deaths, the blood is quite literally a ceaseless torrent of carnage and meat that ends up numbing the view. Oh, another death. Big deal.

It doesn't help that Rambo aside, each character is a barely functional, shallow cypher. A plot puppet that exists solely to push plot to the next setpiece. The morally-challenged Christians who turn to violence, the cycnical, bitter mercenaries built on bullshit posturing, the wafer thin Bad Guy lacking in motive - each of their fates is mercilessly telegraphed from the first second they appear, and the predictable plot sees each of these fates inevitably fulfilled akin to some fulfilling prophecy.

Rambo's only redeeming feature is the ceaseless adrenalin rush of violence that is deeply reminiscent of old fashioned war films : in the days before everything was test-screened and demographicised to a bland, featureless, identical morass of cynical bullshit. Stallone sleepwalks his way through the role with a resigned calm, aware that at some point inevitably he has to explode into a cataclysm of apocalyptic violence.



And what glorious violence it is. I don't feel patronised or insulted by a castrated, nonsensical selection of stylish, CGI non-sequiters that just make the viewer feel as if he is watching a PG version of an X movie. But aside from this, the film offers nothing. The intelligent and mature moral curve of Rocky Balboa is obliterated in a tidal wave of incoherent moral posturing (War Is Bad, But Rambo Is War On Legs, the Burmese are Awful, 284 Wrongs Do Make A Right, etc...), that ultimately make Rambo a narrative mess.

And the whole thing is over in 81 minutes. There's plenty to be said for an economy of film making that overrides modern films tendancies to drag everything out half an hour longer than needs be, but Rambo is too slight a film, and barely aware of its moral compass, to carry any gravitas. It deserves recognition for attempting to be beyond the usual McGuffin-plot of modern, lowest-common-denominator, CGI-heavy insulting, childish bullshit - but also, deserves to be damned for thoroughly failing to elevate itself beyond the usual, mundane matchbox philosophy of your average war film. What most people call Home, he may call Hell, but for me, Rambo is a triumph of ambition over ability, and ultimately a fascinating, brutally flawed, and thoroughly predictable cinematic failure.

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