Londoners Magazine

Film: Rambo
Released: 22 February 2008
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz
Certificate: 18
Running time: 91 minutes

Rambo’s back, this time fighting baddies in Burma, writes Chris Lo.

Having successfully revisited the Rocky series in 2006, Sylvester Stallone has attempted an even more unlikely resurrection. Twenty years after Rambo was last seen decimating the Soviets in Afghanistan, the machete-wielding one-man army is back.

We join the grizzly (and elderly - Stallone is now 61) Vietnam vet in self-imposed exile in Thailand, where he is scraping a living catching cobras for local snake shows. He’s been talked into escorting a group of missionaries to provide aid to a rebel village in war-torn Burma. The missionaries are promptly captured, and it falls to Rambo to tie on the old bandana and save the day.

It’s a fairly insipid narrative - the missionaries are a bland, characterless bunch and it’s hard to care about their fate. As for the baddies, they’re clearly marked out with cigars, aviator shades and a penchant for bayoneting innocent villagers. In the end, the simple story serves to set up the action - and the action delivers.

The violence that Rambo instigates on his rescue/rampage is genuinely shocking. This is partly a result of director and actor Stallone wanting to portray the horrors of combat and the realities of the civil war in Burma. But he also aims to please die-hard action fanatics - and Rambo revels in its thoroughly Eighties brand of carnage. Limbs fly, heads explode, catchphrases are spouted, and through it all, Rambo sprints about like a mad God of war.

While nowhere near the quality of First Blood, Rambo manages to tick enough action film boxes to be thoroughly enjoyable to the right audience. If you never liked dumb action films, Rambo certainly won’t convert you. However, if you’ve been mourning the demise of the old-school popcorn action flick, this has your name all over it.