I just got back from seeing Rambo. I went to an afternoon show alone since I knew my wife wouldn’t come. I must say, it was quite a good flick. The action is very intense and this is by far the goriest movie I have seen in years. It’s like Hostel 1+Hostel 2+Hostel 3+nameanothergorymovie.
I really liked both First Blood I and II, not so much III. This is probably the second best of the series. It’s super short, probably only 80 minutes or so of actual movie and there are no minutes in which Sly has his shirt off.
The action is WAY over the top. More so than any recent action flick and it is definitely not for the faint of heart as there are some pretty intense scenes in it, even for a Rambo flick.
It’s not COMPLETEly brainless but it’s not a thinking mans movie either. If you want to see Rambo fuckshitup then go see this movie ASAP.
(As a side note I forgot how fucked up shit is in Burma until the begining of this movie)
Saw this yesterday. (I saw the previous three in theaters and figured I should keep it up.)
It’s not a good film. However, it delivers exactly the hoped-for goods to the target audience, for whom it will be a great movie.
Bottom line: simplistic problem (lots of totally evil people), followed by simplistic solution (mow them down like grass). It was certainly entertaining enough; as action movies go, it’s constructed with impeccable professionalism.
I was a little disturbed by two separate things during the screening:
First, I thought the use of news footage to set the scene, complete with shots of actual dead human beings caught by videojournalist cameras, was in pretty poor taste. My moviegoing companion and I had a long talk about it afterward; we waffled between thinking it was necessary, to educate the audience (half the mouthbreathers in the room were probably unaware that Burma is a real place with real problems), and thinking it was gratuitously exploitative, in that we were being jacked up with outrage preparatory to enjoying a gore-porn revenge fantasy against the subhumans who committed those atrocities. We didn’t really come to a resolution.
The other thing was the kids in the audience. There was a nine or ten year old chubby pre-pube in our row, a couple of seats on the other side of my companion. He was whimpering within a minute, during the opening horrorshow. He was out of his seat, twitching and whining, when Rambo slaughtered the pirates. And all the while, his father, obviously a wanna-be soldier-of-fortune type (possibly ex-military), growled at him: “Siddown, shaddup, I’m watching this.” Eventually the kid’s mother escorted him out while the father sat in stony, contemptuous silence.