Rambo (part __)

Resplendent in Ralph Karen hand-woven headband, Rambo heads up river.

It was a summer evening in northeast Washington state, wavy heat rising from the pavement outside the hotel, where some channel had a Rambo marathon going on. I thought, "Great. I haven't procrastacriticized Rambo, and it's about freakin' time."

Then a couple of things happened to waylay me. One was learning that the Rambo I was watching was not from the '80's but a mere four years ago. But that wasn't what stopped me. It was learning the very next day that Stallone's son had died. Even though nobody looks at this blog, picking on the grieving seems mean even for a blog critic, so I gave it a break. I feel for him, and cannot imagine that kind of loss.

Rambo, however, is an imaginary guy, even more so than Rocky or Sly Stallone his own self. In the confusingly eponymous 4th episode (at least they decided to stop the even more confusing "First Blood Part __" titling), John Rambo is near Burma. Presumably in Thailand or Laos, although I could tell most Americans he was in Vietnam or Guyana and it would make no difference.

Now, he is a reclusive villager (a feat tat only w Westerner can pull off), spending his days catching snakes for the locals to use in their tourist shows, in a place where the rain only ever stops when he wants to do some face-acting. For some reason (I'm thinking it must be common sense), the locals prefer to have a crazed vet do their cobra-catching, and I even suspect that they invented the whole snake-show thing as a way to put this uninvited psychopath in harm's way, hoping the problem would solve itself. Instead, they end up having to complain that enough cobras are in custody, and they'd like to get some pythons; Rambo has been so effective a snake-catcher that the village is soon to be devoured by rats.

Admittedly, I an no expert in the economics of snake-catching, but I have to assume that the villagers are horrible snake-keepers or Rambo is secretly killing the serpents at night, because otherwise a once-daily snake show would not create sufficient demand for a snake-grabber bringing them new talent day after day, earning enough to afford a boat and nice archery gear. Unless, of course, the people really were trying to kill him and divvy up his stuff.

Or maybe he supplements his living by blacksmithing. John J Rambo, brooding and Thorish, pounding rebar into propellers. Later, as he prepares to do battle, he makes a machete. In a jungle country, where machetes are the single most common metal tool and the closest rebar is in Yangon, hmmm. Makes no sense, until you ponder the depth of the man's self-sufficiency, the scope of his killer artistry. No store-bought blade for him…not a chance. I can respect that.

So then along come the missionaries. The movie failed to portray them as being drawn to his snake-handling abilities, which was disappointing. Instead, they just want to sneak them into Burma to help tribespeople who are being persecuted because they are Christian (and oh yeah, the wrong ethnicity). Clean-cut do-gooders clearly disgust Rambo, who is too wise for that peace and love bullshit. The intensity of his dismissal, of course, can only signal a turn-around, and the fact that one of the missionaries is a pretty female can only mean that Rambo's heart will melt, and that we are all about to learn something.

What we viewers learn is that by 2008 the effects, if not particularly special, are more convincing than in First Blood Part I, or II, or probably even III. [Oh the redundancy, it reminds me of that time I saw in a friend's footlocker of porn the title "My First Time, Part II"?!] Every lead-hitting-flesh shot seems to be individually miked, and both the injuries and corpses seem more realistic than at the dawn of the Rambo Age. This installment reportedly has the highest body count of any in the series, and we are treated to everything from fresh dismemberment to pig-gnawed bodies to blowfly-bloated bodies. Two thumbs up for realistic carnage.

Not so much for the dialogue. Rambo remains speech impaired, and prone to saying things like:
"when you're pushed, killin's as easy as breathing'"
or
"there isn't one of us who doesn't wanna be somewhere else…but this is what we do...live for something, or die for nothing" (his longest speech, I think).

Rambo does not want to go with the woefully unprepared and naive Jesus freaks, and warns them against entering a war zone. Of course they do, and of course he ends up going in to save them, cajoled by their preacher (the White Shadow!) into joining a group of mercenaries hired with the job. Rambo is aloof, though, and clearly sees this whole episode as an imposition on his usual snake-catching gig; he is not  one with the mercenaries, and we see that he is better and wiser than they are.

Rambo guides his boat up-river to the…yawn…heart of darkness. There are no heads on sticks or acid trips, just some pirates with slow enough reflexes to be dispatched easily. The hot missionary's milquetoast guy friend objects to the killing, warning Rambo that he will report the murders, which we should all immediately recognize as foreshadowing to his subsequent bashing-in of a Burmese guy's head with a rock. With typical understatement, Rambo responds with"They would've raped her fifty times... and cut your fucking heads off! Who are you? Who are any of you?"

The whole movie is like this. Stallone recognizes hypocrisy and loathes it, but deals with it though subtle writerly devices like head-bashing and mass murder.  Or men of god who hire mercenaries, who turn out to be not that good at fighting. Oh, and of course the evil villain who wants to 'purify' Myanmar has a thing for young boys…genocide is not quite bad enough, so you gotta throw in some pedophiliac buggery to make it clear. I keep wondering what would have happened had a young Stallone been handed a dictionary instead of a copy of armaments catalogues and boxing videos; what if he had gone for a refined message, instead of escalating body counts?

At some point after said body count topping 200, after he gets to use his hand-forged blade on the evil Myamarmy, after he delivers the missionaries to safety (having taught them to not be so damned peaceful and self-righteous), we see that Rambo has finally made a breakthrough. He returns to Arizona to find his dad; he is ready to step out of the heart of darkness. Or maybe he's just tired of cobras, and wants to try his hand at rattlers.

Godspeed, John Rambo, Godspeed.