This appreciation of death is one of the film’s dominant themes. When the medical missionaries realize how difficult it is to make a dent in something as unruly and complex as the Burmese civil war, their outlook changes from sacrifice to survival. In the process, the missionaries lose their innocence, purity, and sanity. Meanwhile, the only thing they gain is a traumatic experience. What will those who survive report to their church when they return? Perhaps, the description of running through a corpse-laden terrain as gunfire takes the life of the person running beside you?
With this depiction in mind, how is it that the good guys never get pumped full of friendly fire as thousands of bullets rip through the air? With Rambo, fans must look beyond the unlikely, the cheap white text used on the subtitles and credits, and the fact that Jerry Goldsmith (composer) and Richard Crenna (Col. Sam Trautman) are not involved due to cancer. What’s most important is that Stallone traverses generations and represents an accurate representation of what John would be like two decades after Afghanistan.
There is no question that Stallone can still act, write, and direct; he has proved all three most recently with Rocky Balboa and Rambo. The question is however: can Stallone act, write, or direct a character that he hasn’t previously played? Not including Stallone’s 1983 effort Staying Alive, the answer will come next year in his chronicle of the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe. Keep your eyes peeled and your mind open.
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Article comments
1 - Moriarte
Alternate Title: Rambo-4 arms
Ram-Bore
This film had such a weak story line it could only be strung out for an hour and a quarter. It basically concerns a group of christian missionaries being held hostage in Burma, and Rambo, along with a group of mercenaries, being contracted by a Pastor to free them.
Rambo 4 is in stark contrast to the other Rambos where he muscle posed his way to self glory. In this film, however, he must have been too self conscious of his love handles and sausage veins that the central focus of Rambo, and his character as a whole for that matter, was his forearms.
The Burmese soldiers were portrayed as verminous killing scum who feed live people to pigs, and Sly even makes further propaganda swipes at Burmese generals by portraying the one in this movie as a raper of young boys.
The killing is so gratuitous and lustful, you wonder what kind of sick, sado-masterbatory audience could enjoy this snuff movie. Rambo manages to effortlessly kill everybody in every imaginable way, and would have encountered more resistance had the Burmese army been replaced by a bunch of grannies armed with knitting needles and balls of wool. And where the hell he manages to find , in the middle of the jungle, some kind of huge, thermo-nuclear device to detonate at short notice is any one's guess.
This abomination of a movie further insult by trying to add believability to this sado-wet dream, by allowing Rambo to get a slight nick from a bullet to his shoulder in the last minutes of the film, as he's mopping up the final remaining Burmese 'skittle' soldiers.
It was a pity Rambo's Kernel is no longer alive as he was the real star of the Rambo franchise and provided the only hint of class and proper acting.
Anyone claiming this was just a bit of fun should watch again the actual footage of the suffering of the Burmese people shown at the beginning of this film, appreciate how Sly has tried to glorify himself at their expense, and then should proceed straight to the doctors and have their brains checked out for advanced syphilis.