A fair warning: I like Rocky Balboa. I like First Blood, and as cartoony as it becomes, I still enjoy Rambo: First Blood Part II. I can't defend Rambo III, but the good news is that I don't have to. Stallone's Rambo isn't trying to be Part II or III. Just like Rocky Balboa is a direct sequel to Rocky, so too is Rambo to First Blood.
Which is not to say that it's a lot like First Blood. One of the things you need to know is that Stallone carries the mentality of John Rambo from the first film into 2008's Rambo. The other thing you might want to know is that Rambo is not akin to Rocky Balboa in any way: the way each film handles the journey of their title characters is totally different. Rocky Balboa is about hope, and Rambo is not.
The violence in Rambo isn't as cartoony as it gets in the sequels, but there's enough gore and grue to make people coming just for that happy. At the same time, this isn't so much "AWESOME!" violence as it is "Oh Jesus!" violence. Until about halfway into the movie, any scene of violence is there to disturb you. The first time Rambo kills anyone, it's over so quickly you don't see much of anything.
When things get unhinged towards the end, the gore takes it up to 11 in no time at all. Heads get blown off, people's arms and legs are ripped apart by explosions, people are burned and mutilated, and yes, some guy gets his throat ripped out. Slowly. Maybe it was just me, but even when Rambo kills the "big" bad guy, it wasn't a "hell yeah!" moment so much as a "geez!" scene. That must've been what Stallone was going for, because all of the "rah rah" kills are visceral and disgusting. They happen quickly, and when it's over you don't want to linger.
Sylvester Stallone also avoids easy comparisons to Rocky by making John Rambo not just emotionally different, but physically too. Rocky was an over the hill boxer, but he had enough definition to be clear that he was once a fighter. He still has the sense of being chiseled. I can't remember who said it, but Rambo doesn't look like the chiseled stud of Part II or III. Instead, this dude looks like he was cut from a tree with an axe. John Rambo looks like a hulking nightmare hiding out in the jungle, a mass of muscule waiting to spring to action.
I liked Rambo: it's not really on long enough to overstay its welcome (without credits, it's a lean 80 minutes), and it doesn't dwell on Rambo's "down on life" outlook in any way that gets annoying. It's an effective, if exceptionally bleak action movie for most of the runtime, with a strange ending that wants to bookend with the beginning of First Blood. I don't know how I feel about that just yet, but I can safely say that Rambo is as good as Rocky Balboa, if for different reasons.
No comments:
Post a Comment