Rambo

Reviewed by:
Harold Helman

If you see only one film this year about a 60-year-old man disemboweling the Burmese, make it this one! In all seriousness—well, semi-seriousness—Rambo is a blast. Unlike Rocky Balboa, Rambo refuses to believe that it's been 20 years since we last saw our beloved Vietnam vet helping put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan (go back and watch Rambo III again), and actually feels like an '80s action movie in every positive sense of that phrase. Minimal plot, barely written (or acted) characters, and truckloads of bat-shit action, Rambo is a prepackaged cult movie. We defy you to have more fun watching people torn apart by bullets, blown up by land mines, and generally subjected to horrifying human rights violations. And even though we joke, Stallone somehow seems younger in this than he did in Rocky Balboa (maybe it's the wig). His John Rambo is a lot heftier and a little slower, but somehow it works. And the basic conceit (that John just cannot turn off the war inside, no matter what) makes Rambo a leaner film, less bogged down in sentiment than Balboa, despite its attempts to be relevant and less cartoonish than its predecessors. Even the coda—which, without giving too much away, involves a scene meant to bookend with the opening of First Blood—is both laugh-out-loud funny (2008 Stallone trying to look like 1982 Stallone? C'mon) and also kind of cool despite itself. You're laughing, but it's not derisive. It's like watching your oldest buddy trying on his high school varsity jacket. You give him shit for it, but you can't begrudge him a trip down nostalgia lane.