Rambo

Not to be confused with Rambo - First Blood, Part II, Rambo is the fourth episode in a life story that's survived a lot longer than anyone would have predicted. When we first met John Rambo more than a quarter of a century ago he was already an anachronism, a soldier who had outlived his war and his usefulness.

Or so we thought. Just a couple of years later President Reagan was citing him as a foreign policy role model, and Rambo had grown from man to myth. He sorted out Afghanistan rather more efficiently than NATO seems to be able to manage (I don't remember him giving Mr Charlie Wilson his due), and it's pretty clear the US could use him again now - though Rambo has obviously learned something from past experience, he's steering well clear of Iraq, and repeatedly urges the Christian missionaries who want him to escort them up river into Burma to leave it alone. He'd rather be catching cobras for Thai snake circuses than encroaching on someone else's civil war.

All the same, he's a soft touch when it comes to the missionary position, it only takes Sarah (Julie Benz) to beseech him with the kind of old fashioned idealism he's learned to distrust, and the next thing you know we're in the midst of "Apocalypse Now - Redux ad absurdam". Never get out of the boat. Never get out of the boat!

Cut to a few weeks later, and Rambo the boatman is again pressed into service, this time to ferry half a dozen mercenaries on a rescue mission to free those missionaries who haven't already been blown limb from limb, shot through the head or fed to the hogs. As you can imagine, Rambo's strategy has nothing in common with the passive resistance the Burmese military dictators are used to.

According to one analysis, the death toll in this film is 236, or 2.59 deaths for every screen minute. Rambo himself dispatches an honourable 83. (The bad guys kill a whopping 113, and in gruesome detail too.) All of which makes this the most violent of the series by a long shot.

I have to say I've always been more of a Rocky man myself. If I wanted the kind of action hero who'd come up with quips like "Pain doesn't hurt", I'd watch an Arnie movie. Still, this is the first of the Rambo films Stallone has directed himself (officially anyway), and he seems to have the measure of what it's about: for all the excessive carnage and brutal subject matter, it's not a movie that expects to be taken as realistic.

At 91 minutes it's a tight B movie with plenty of action and a pretty cynical view about the cost of foreign intervention (Rambo may even be a closet liberal: the movie serves to propagandize against the Burmese military junta, but it's hardly an advertisement for direct action. Incidentally, it's "Burma" in the movie, never "Myanmar".)

Shot in Thailand, the film is atmospheric and well mounted. Among the cast, two Brits stand out: Matthew Marsden is very good as the sniper, "Schoolboy". And Graham McTavish, playing the chief mercenary, Lewis, makes such a credible racist loud-mouthed lout that I came home and googled him to make sure he hadn't really served in the military at some stage (Apparently he's an actor.)

As for Stallone, I don't know what drugs he's on and I don't want to know. With a neck the size of a tree trunk it's just as well Rambo doesn't have a white-collar job. He ain't pretty, but he can still pass for an action hero, even if that means ripping out a man's throat with his bare hands.

Two years ago, I don't think anyone held out much hope that the sixty-year-old could pull off new installments of Rocky and Rambo without embarrassing himself mightily in the process. His glory days may be behind him, but Sly has exceeded expectations and then some. If you like this kind of thing, you got no complaints.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com