Motion Picture Magic: Rambo (2008)

"You know what you are..."

"...what you're made of..."

"War is in your blood..."

"Don't fight it..."

"You didn't kill for your country...You killed for yourself..."

"God's never gonna make that go away..."

...

"When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathin..."

....

Or as my friends like to say: "When ya push'd, killin's zas zeazy as breazin's."

So begins a new continuing feature that I would like to present, "Motion Picture Magic," with my reviews of really good/really bad movies (or movies that I just plain enjoy for no good reason). Above is some of the best monologue from the brilliant film that I watched last Saturday, "Rambo." Written, starring, and directed by Sylvester Stallone, "John Rambo" is the latest installment of the "Rambo" series, with 20 years since the release of "Rambo III" in 1988. I won't go into too many details about the Rambo franchise, but the main point is that Rambo is usually sent on missions involving him going into enemy terrority alone, heavily armed, and usually outnumbered somewhere on the order of 100 to 1. Now, the only other Rambo movie I've seen is the first Rambo movie, and that was a long time ago, but many of Stallone's character traits in this installment are shown to be the results of him perhaps going on one too many missions and ripping the throats off one too many dudes.

The short version of the background story is that Rambo is now living the peaceful life of a boatman/snake-catcher in Thailand, still seemingly haunted by his experiences in the past (killing hundreds of dudes will do that to you). Well, a Christian missionary group shows up and wants to be taken into nearby Burma, to aid some of the rural villages with supplies and medical skills (such as sewing up legs that have been blown off by land mines, ya know, the usual). Naturally, Rambo gives them the "wow you guys are really dumb" speech, but is finally convinced by some white chick (I guess Rambo probably hasn't had a good lay in a while). He takes them up river and drops them off safely, but somehow, the village they are in manages to get bombed, massacred, and basically completely destroyed by Burmese Tyrant X (they don't say his name in the movie, at least not that I heard), who is a short, Burmese (you guessed it) dude, with almost no motivation as to why he's destroying every village in his path. There is a reason, but it's kinda lame, in that he's pissed off at the world for being...different... (I HATE TO RUIN THE MOVIE FOR YOU, BUT HE'S INTO BOYS). Naturally, some dude shows up asking for Rambo to go save the stupid white people, and we're off to the massacre.

Now, I was actually surprised after I was done with this movie, because I didn't think it was the worst movie ever. It's probably up there in the top 50, but definitely not Top 20 worst movies I've ever seen (I've seen some bad ones, ie Troll 2). Sylvester Stallone was somewhere between bad and fair, acting-wise, but I felt the movie's direction, cinematography, and effects managed to keep me engaged for the duration of the film (a seemingly very short hour and 33 minutes). The chief white girl and white guy of the missionary party were so annoying that they made me wanna take a sledgehammer to my nuts (and that's saying something, cuz there's not many reasons I can think of as to why I would ever want to take a sledgehammer to my nuts), but the overall cast didn't make me want to puke (which is more than I can say for say...Spiderman 3, but more on that some other time). But the crazy part is how huge Stallone looks. I mean, huge (see picture above). Honestly, Stallone looks as if he's been doing more steroids than the entire MLB, NFL, and WWE combined. The man's like 60 for Christ's sake. It is not natural to be that old and that buff.

Now comes the good part. The special effects in this movie were ridiculous. When I say special effects, I don't mean explosions, crazy lights, or various visual effects. I'm talking about bodies exploding (yes, exploding). Some of the scenes had such realistic violence that a couple times I was thinking, "whoa, did they hire some random Thai dude to get his face blown off?" or "Wow, I think they may have actually killed a guy, that was so real." There are multiple scenes that involve lots of people getting mowed down by some pretty enormous 50 cal's, and people are losing limbs/faces/torsos left and right. All I'm thinking is "Wow, either they're really killing people, or that's a lot of fake blood and limbs."

In short, if you want some good entertainment (and unintentional comedy) for an hour and a half, Rambo will not disappoint. The body count is a fairly impressive 236, with 99% of the kills being either evil Burmese army guys or innocent civilians (lots of innocent civilian deaths in this one). But definitely do not watch this film if you have an aversion to blood/guts/gore/lost limbs/rampant death. Otherwise, I definitely implore you to partake in this *ahem* visual masterpiece *ahem*.

Overall Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

I leave you with the NC-17 teaser for Rambo. Warning: do not watch this if you have an aversion to gore.