‘Rambo’: mindless or a marvel?

By Dan Moore

Published Feb. 1, 2008

Is Sylvester Stallone a brilliant auteur or a dumb action star? There’s no oeuvre in Hollywood for which this question of its creator’s intelligence is more important.

The success of “Rambo,” Stallone’s latest franchise reboot, depends on this question: Is this strange film a marvel of subtext from the man Roger Ebert famously compared 30 years ago to Marlon Brando? Or is it, as has been suggested, mindless gore-porn from a cultural relic?

Rambo is now a broken-down snake-catcher for a low-budget sideshow in Thailand. There’s no telling how long he’s been there or why; Stallone, who wrote and directed the film, eschews exposition, which gives this Rambo an unsettling abandoned quality. It’s as though he’s been asleep these last 20 years while the world changed around him.

As the man running the snake show drones in broken English, a group of missionaries bound for war-torn Burma begs Rambo to take them upriver to a village of persecuted Burmese Christians. He refuses until, pleaded with to believe in something, he drops them off and returns home, forced to struggle with his own rudderless life.

What follows begins in earnest what is one of the most staggeringly violent films ever made. Absurdly ruthless, dehumanized militants, who seem more a personification of evil and internal struggle than actual characters, slaughter the village. Time–we’re not told how much–passes, and through flashbacks we see how the missionaries have triggered a haunting return to life for a man who’s been living on autopilot since 1988.

What’s remarkable is the restraint and technique Stallone employs as a director. For a movie in which, according to the Los Angeles Times, no fewer than 236 people are killed on-screen, it has a very measured and technical quality. The flashbacks stop when someone first utters the word Rambo. It happens halfway through the movie, and it’s a great device, akin to the way the shark was kept off-screen in “Jaws.” When he’s asked to save the missionaries–when his last name is invoked–there is a palpable sense of his past giving him no choice but to confront it.

And confront it he does, in what reads like a 236-man Western shootout. He arrives at the climactic battle not for an ideal but for himself. It is that old film criticism trope of the regeneration through violence that he seems to be after.

And perhaps that’s where it’s been construed as gore-porn. Perhaps his survival, his killer instinct that serves the movie’s good cause only incidentally, is what makes us most uncomfortable in this remarkably uncomfortable film.

But as he stands victorious, overlooking the battlefield, it’s obvious that no amount of violence can give him that John Wayne rebirth. There is no catchphrase; no happy moment with the victorious rebels - only a long trip home, for uncertain results. He is a strange action hero, and “Rambo” is a strange movie. I can only suggest watching them both very closely and drawing your own conclusions.