So, yeah, a movie from 2008 might not exactly be considered "kicking it old school," but I figured, since it's the fourth in a series of rad action movies from the '80s, it can count. Also, I watched First Blood a couple of weeks ago and was completely weirded out by the fact that it didn't take place in a jungle, but a town in the U.S. Crazy, right? Who knew? Probably the rest of you, but I didn't. Anyway, here's how things went down with the new (?) and improved (?) Rambo.
Rambo (2008)
Directed by Sylvester Stallone
Written by Sylvester Stallone & Art Monterastelli
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz and a bunch of dudes who either get blown up or beaten close to death
Averages 2.59 killings per minute. Has a kill count of 236, the most for any Rambo film.
Okay, so I had a couple of beers and decided to watch Rambo and man, what a great choice (the movie, not the beer, though I find beer to be a great choice often enough). Here's a couple of facts I learned from IMDB.com that will give a pretty great idea of how the movie stacks up against its predecessors: there are 236 kills on screen, which average out to 2.59 deaths per minute. Awesome. Seriously.
So, here's the plot. Rambo's living in a jungle (or something) near Burma (which is called something else now). Julie Benz plays a missionary who asks for Rambo's help to go to a different part of the jungle which he eventually agrees to. She and the other missionaries get attacked while Rambo sleeps on the boat. A military guy shows up and asks Rambo to ferry a bunch of other army dudes to help find Julie Benz (who, I forgot to mention got captured by the Burma guys). He agrees and they head into the jungle.
As a quick side note, I don't actually know anything about Burma except for what I saw in the Kardashian's PSA (YouTube that if you haven't seen it), but the Burmans (?) in this flick are so repulsive that they just might be the new Nazis, you know, cannon fodder type characters you don't mind seeing get their limbs and heads blown off (more on that later).
Back to the story, the scene where the Burmese attack the missionary camp is absolutely insane. They storm in there and kill anything that moves (including kids, but excluding Julie Benz). It's a pretty rough scene to watch (the beer helped). So once Rambo hooks up with the army dudes, he ferries them to the camp site, but their leader insists on leaving him there, but don't worry, he doesn't. Which is great because Rambo shows up to shoot arrows into the heads and necks of the bad guys as they roll up on the decimated camp.
Later, they run an attack on the Burman soldier camp at night (which is awesome). Things (including people) get blown up in the process, but Rambo saves Julie Benz, even though the other army dudes make a run back to the boat after rescuing a few of the other missionaries. Now Rambo's on the run with Julie and the army guys' sniper who stuck around to help out.
So, they're running through the jungle trying to get back to the boat. Rambo tells sniper and Julie to head to the boat and he sets up a claymore mine to explode some dudes. And wow, does he explode some dudes. It looked like a nuke went off. I have no idea how realistic this was, but it looked crazy.
All of this leads to Rambo coming up on the army dudes being held by the Burmese jerks. He jumps on the back of a truck and starts blasting away with some kind of gatling gun or something that absolutely tears the bad guys into pieces. It's one of the bloodiest 10-15 minutes of film I've ever seen and, again, it's awesome. Have I mentioned that I liked movie violence? Cause I do. And Rambo gives it up in spades.
I gotta give it to Stallone. The dude was 62 when Rambo came out and he looks rad and haggard, just like Rambo would. Call me easily-entertained, but an hour and a half of Stallone running around a jungle, making mince meat out of jerk-holes is a great way to spend part of an evening. If you liked any of the other Rambo movies or like seeing older dudes kick some ass (like Willis in the latest Die Hard or Harrison Ford in Indy 4 or even Stallone in Rocky Balboa, which I haven't seen yet) or just crazy action movies where the good guy wins and the bad guy dies horribly, then you'll definitely enjoy Rambo.
One more quick thing. Something I really liked about Rambo is that there isn't one specific villain. It's not like Rambo's matching wits with one guy, he's facing an entire army of evil jerks. There is a guy later on (the guy getting stabbed in the guts above) who leads the guys beating up on the army guys towards the end of the movie, but it's not an arch-villain type of thing. It's a nice difference of story from the previous installments and a lot of the other movies out there that took a page or 90 from the Rambo scriptbook.
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