Rambo 4: The Stallone
Renaissance Part Two
So of course
there should be no doubt in your minds that I saw Rambo 4 this lovely opening weekend. I have to say, I’m blown away. Rambo
is sorta like The Leprechaun from those Leprechaun movies. You can send the fucker anywhere and it will
turn into his movie. Like how they sent
the Leprechaun into outer space, and da hood, and
Vegas and it always somehow still turned into a Leprechaun movie. You could
send Rambo to the centre of the Earth or to an old age home or to a petting zoo
and the thing would slowly pan to a guy trying to live in peace followed by
some discrete stealth-based kills and ultimately deteriorating into a bloody
montage of a massacre.
If you sent the
guy to the North Pole he’d probably try to live in peace and build himself a
little igloo where he’d stickfight walruses for the
amusement of polar bears and spend his evenings peacefully humming Eskimo songs
and helping the locals until a gang of badassed
penguins showed up and destroyed his igloo settlement and he had to go around
slitting their penguin throats with icicles and ultimately making a machine gun
harpoon and slaughtering those fuckers until even Morgan Freeman’s narration
track would just turn to dead silence in shock.
Why? Because
it’s John Rambo and his formula will happen wherever he is. Even if there aren’t
penguins at the North Pole.
I’m sure if you
had movie where Rambo was in restraints in a mental institution we’d get the
same plotline and massacre playing out in his head in a dream sequence because
wherever John Rambo is, a Rambo
movie has to happen if only in his dreams (like how I’ll be home for
Christmas). They could even do the dream
sequence Rambo movie like Yellow Submarine or that stop-motion Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer and it
would still come down to a soundtrack dominated by machine gun noises and a
montage of bodies hitting the ground.
In this movie
it’s set in
In classic old
school action tradition the moral message is totally ambiguous. Something like: violence is bad, but entertaining, and other people’s wars aren’t ours
to fight but everything is better when we do, and farms are good. The ending is kinduvan
attempt to go full circle and evoke images of First Blood and suggest that John Rambo has found peace after this
latest slaughter. I’m not sure where he
found peace during the course of this movie, maybe it was hidden in that last
dude’s appendix and that was what flopped out when Rambo gutted him. I’d actually like a movie serial about how
every man’s key to inner peace and satisfaction is hidden in the internal
organs of another man somewhere else on Earth and we must wander about,
disemboweling and maiming until we find it.
But this isn’t that film series, or if it is they should’ve maybe had a
wizard or something spell that out more clearly back in the first one.
My favorite part
of the film was Rambo’s fever dream in the middle where he has flashbacks to
the previous films. It was done with the
same virtuoso flair as the part in Rocky
4 when Rocky goes for that night drive and keeps having blue tinted visions
of Ivan Drago dancing in front of a strobe light. It was done using every classic hallmark of
the dream sequence possible. Most modern
action movies are shot through tints for their entire duration, so it was
pleasant to see a movie where they didn’t need to bleach out everything and
make it all brown to show it was hot or make it all blue to show it was night
like they would in some
I guess if I had
one criticism of the film it would be that it needed a bunch of Terrence Malick style random cutaways to slowmotion
shots of owls and hawks taking flight and lingering shots of the jungle with
cricket chirping noises to give it an air of ridiculous self-importance. I think at least the dream sequence could’ve
had one of those moments where they show a shot of an owl turning its head with
a spooky echo of its coo followed by the exact same thing two more times faster
and louder and with more echo. But I
guess if wants owls I’ll just have look elsewhere. No biggie.
I thought after Rocky 6 that Stallone was going to use
this movie to give John Rambo a similar sentimental sendoff, but no. Stallone
is doing something incredibly trippy right now. What we’ve got is the Stallone Renaissance,
not a new Stallone, not a new take on Stallone, but the same Stallone
rebooted. Rocky 6 was more of a sequel to Rocky or Rocky 2 than it
was a sequel to Rocky 3 though Rocky 5. But Rambo
4 is definitely a sequel to Rambo 3
and not the sequel to First Blood
that I was expecting.
With his
previous film Rocky 6 (Rocky Bolboa) Stallone recreated
that first section of his career when he played multi-layered characters who
were victims of circumstances in movies like Rocky, Rocky 2, and First Blood. With this new Rambo 4, Stallone has now recaptured the second phase of his
career, which is probably best represented by Over The Top. That movie is a good representation of how
Stallone used that credit from his earlier films to do silly blockbusters. Over The Top is the best representation
because a) the film is fucking awesome; and b) it works as a thematic metaphor,
allow me to explain.
At this point in his career Stallone was arm wrestling with
ridiculousness. And like any real arm
wrestling match it’s pretty subjective as to who’s winning depending on your
perspective. Movies like Cobra probably split audiences in terms
of who came out on top: Stallone or Sillyness.
I’d probably
also use his film Demolition Man to
define the Third Phase of Stallone because what you’ve got is a guy from
another time unfrozen in a ridiculous world still kicking ass in an old school
way but his brand of heroism is just overwhelmed by the sillyness
of this futuristic world. The parallel
is perfect, Stallone was already that guy in 1990s, a
hero from the previous decade of muscleman heroes in a world where his brand of
heroism couldn’t remain stoic in the face of the goofyness
that surrounded him. I mean, the early
1990s saw them try to replace Steve McQueen with Alec Baldwin in a remake of The Getaway, so how’s a guy like Cobra
even going to begin to approach justice in a world like that? Even Arnold Schwarzenegger had been reduced
to wearing sleeves and making shitty cop movies like Erasure in which he didn’t even kill anybody with an erasure.
So like I said, Stallone’s got two out of the three phases of his career
recreated now: the sincere respectable phase and the blockbuster phase, so what
we need now to complete the Stallone Renaissance is a sequel to Demolition Man where John Spartan is
unfrozen even further into the future where he seems even more irrelevant. I’d like to see Spartan be the only guy who
can’t do wire-fu in an action movie, or maybe that machine that fined you for
cussing now actually bleeps you right out like they did to poor John McClane with Die
Hard 4, another old school action hero who finds a modern world won’t even
let him say “Yippy-kay-yay,
mutherfucker!” in his own movie (special note:
that line was cut theatrically but added back in for the unrated DVD). How would John Spartan react to modern Bourne style shakeycam? Would John Spartan be confused by how every
modern action film has to mention 9/11?
Would John Spartan be unfrozen to find his life being led by Christian
Bale or Daniel Craig? This film has to
happen. Stallone must complete the
summary of his career.
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