John Rambo
With almost every major movie franchise giving a reprise to their highly successful concepts of the seventies and eighties, it was only far to flick the dust off the Rambo bravado and bring him into the public eye. After Sylvester Stallone turned out to be highly successful in reprising the Rocky series with 'Rocky Balboa', he was looking for being second time lucky with John Rambo.
'John Rambo' (2008) is the fourth part of the franchise, which brings back Sly Stallone in one of the most famous characters he has ever played, and maybe one of the most famous and identifiable characters in Hollywood movie history – John Rambo.
And this time, John Rambo has to fight in the oldest running civil War in the history of humankind, in Burma. The movie starts with pre-justifying one of the most gory and brutal action movies in recent times, with documentary snatches and then brings us to John Rambo, living a staid and simple life as a snake catcher.
Of course, Rambo is once again taken into the thick of things by a social worker group and has to save them from a very brutal and almost sadistic regime and leader.
The movie has the highest number of kills in any Rambo movie, and has one of the most crisply executed action scenes in recent times. The action scenes can be considered as the opposite of Bullet time, the Unblur, where the action takes place so soon that it should actually be a blur, but isn't, and you can see the guts spilling and the bones cracking, pixel by pixel.
John Rambo is a total, out and out, and complete action flick. It has little or no rewind value, except for some stark action scenes. Sylvester Stallone has not aged gracefully, and though he could pull off a Rocky at this time, he definitely couldn't pull off this one.
One major fault in John Rambo is that it has not considered the progress and education of an entire world. This kind of action porn would work in the seventies and eighties, when one could even joke about terrorism and human rights violations. Today, with these things very much happening almost amongst us, some people with brains may even get angered at the stupid simplicity that John Rambo propagates against terrorism and dictatorship – mow those rascals down with a anti-tank gun.
The world has ample proof today that such brawn and strong arm tactics do not work in this world. But Rambo has no choice. He is not a James Bond to adhere to the changes in time, because Rambo was never a thinking hero. A beast, an animal, the one with the greatest survival instinct, yes, but a hero – no.
