Somewhere back in the past, I reviewed the 2008 Rambo movie, the one where he was living in Southeast Asia and saved a bunch of humanitarian types who hired to ferry them upriver. I mostly remember it being really violent. Like, "Rambo turns a bunch of humans into hamburger with a .50 cal machine gun" violent.
This one might just top that. It moves Rambo back to the U.S., to a farm where he apparently grew up near the U.S.-Mexico border (special cameo appearance by Donald Trump's bullshit border fence). He works with horses on a ranch owned by his mother, with the only other person there his sister's daughter, Gabriella. She finds out where her father ran off to and heads off to Mexico without telling anyone. This is a mistake. Rambo goes to find her, and it makes things worse, I guess.
I say, "I guess" because she'd already been forced into sexual slavery and the guys running the operation make it very clear they'd have sold her that way with no qualms. But because Rambo came looking for her, they basically pump her full of drugs and destroy her mentally with repeated and sustained sexual abuse over the four or five days it takes Rambo to recover from the ass-whupping he got.
Anyway, all that's an excuse for Rambo to, as he put it earlier, "stop holding back," and start to brutally murder a lot of guys. He baits them to the farm, we get a whole Home Alone sequence of him setting traps, and then it's dying time. Dudes getting decapitated with very sharp knives. Guys getting their heads disintegrated with some sort of special shotgun shells he made. Lots of traps that involve falling on sharp things or having them driven into you.
That's fine, I guess. They're not the most creative deaths I've seen on film, and you can only see so many before it loses all effect. They let the main bad guy have too many goons. I definitely hit a point of thinking, "Cripes, he has got to be running out of bad guys by now." He wasn't. And since they're all dying hilariously easy against Rambo, there's hardly any sense that it's a war of attrition on both sides. Like, it could play with the idea that he's an older man now, lot of miles on his body and he's wearing down against the sheer numbers they've got. But it's so easy, that hardly comes across. One guy finally tags him with a bullet, but it doesn't slow him down much.
I know. Why am I asking for something like that from a Rambo movie? You're right, it's silly. There were parts I was interested in at the beginning. The glimpses of Rambo's day-to-day life. He works with horses, but he's built an extensive network of tunnels under the farm which he doesn't even let his family into. He takes some sort of medication, not clear on what. Gabriella says he tends to stare intensely at people, and he responds that he doesn't even know he's doing it.
It's a picture of how he's tried to organize his life. Pare it down to a very basic routine, very little interaction with other people outside the two he lives with. Because he can't trust other people, and he can't trust himself when they prove they can't be trusted.
2 comments:
I will happily sit down and watch First Blood time after time - it just works a treat. Rambo's fallible and human and messed up and reacts badly, but he's believable.
Anything in the franchise after that just became something of a joke for me, so when this last and final Rambo movie came out, I gave it a pass.
The Creed films, though, I thought are well worth a watch.
Other than these two, more recent Rambo films, I think First Blood is the only one I've watched, and yeah, it's pretty good. I heard once they tried to get Kirk Douglas for the Richard Crenna role, but he turned it down because he thought he should kill Rambo at the end. I don't know if he meant it like putting down a mad dog, or like a mercy killing, but obviously they didn't go that route.
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