SoCo Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 58) Muscle-Bound Pathos R ambo Returns By Richard Costa Not a dying franchise after all John Rambo lives in bordering Thailand and makes a living transporting people on a small boat and catching cobras and pythons for local performers. Stallone is in super shape for a 60-something-yearold; in fact, he looks like he ate a bucket of steroids. A group of Christian missionaries from the United States requests his aid so they can get Bibles and medicine to the Karen tribe. They know the risks but wish to go nonetheless. Rambo refuses their request, and only the persistence of genteel Sarah (Julie Benz) changes his mind. On the way, he saves his passengers from Burmese pirates who try to board his boat. After killing them, he’s challenged by the Christians (they’re not big fans of killing). He responds in form to Sarah and the men respectively: “You want her to get raped 50 times and get your heads cut off?” Case closed. He leaves the small group at their destination. Ten days later, he’s visited by an older man from the church who explains that the group Rambo transported to Burma hasn’t been heard from. Rambo, once more the only guy who can do the job, is required to take a not-so-merry band of mercenaries up the river to save them. The Burmese army is portrayed as brutal and pitiless. This is not a film for children, most women, or the faint of heart. Stallone strove to show the horror of this part of the world for what it is, so call it bloody realism. The audience is subjected to rapes, graphic murders, the recruitment of child soldiers, the murder of children, men being blown to pieces, and violence the likes of which I’ve never seen before—and believe me, I thought I’d seen it all in this genre. The film revels in gore while simultaneously taking a real conflict and treating both the subject and the characters seriously. Hats off to Stallone: He still managed to get some memorable lines of machismo into this sequel, for example, “Live for nothing or die for something,” or “When you’re pushed, killing is as easy as breathing.” Rambo’s character will always find himself at home in hell, in whichever part of the world he happens to be. The plot isn’t terribly deep, but the Karen tribe arouses sympathies, the Christians are interesting, the mercenaries are hilarious, and the Burmese army is horrifying. This is really a film that’s about courage in the face of tyranny. Most critics gave this flick a beating, but I thought it held up better than previous Rambos or Stallone’s latest Rocky installment, for that matter. Rambo still paints a portrait of pathos, painful memories, and alienation. And seldom do you get a pro-war viewpoint against a great evil and a positive portrayal of Christian sacrifice in the same film. Mercy meets the brutal realities of a trained killing machine. And they find common ground. O S ylvester Stallone’s character, “Rambo,” conjures up the image of a muscle-bound, bandanawearing Green Beret who is visual shorthand for machismo and going to extremes in the name of patriotism. The Rambo films started with First Blood, a fascinating, if overstated, account of a veteran gone mad on a small-town sheriff who pushed him too far. The following films rapidly devolved into explosionladen B movies that were more on par with the A-Team than a quality action flick. While entertaining, Rambo II and Rambo III were forgettable sequels that transformed the disenfranchised veteran to a national superhero while simultaneously sending him packing to the land of cliché. This latest (much later) installment transforms the genre. Stallone took his subject seriously by researching where some of the world’s most under-reported war atrocities were. And he chose Burma—home to a 60-year civil war and the systematic persecution and extermination of the Karen tribe by the Burmese army. The film opens with newsreel footage of mass shootings and horrifying violence. Realism doesn’t usually come to mind in these types of films, but in this one, Rambo takes us to a part of the world that is rarely reported on by the major media. Burma’s post-imperial England existence is atrocious. The plot is simple: Retired pacifist 58 | s o comagazi ne . i nfo | M ay 2 0 0 8 http://socomagazine.info
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