You'll believe a man can mumble
Hurrah! Rambo is back! Some twenty years on since he defeated the entire Russian armed forces in Afghanistan, now he's blowing half of Burma to smithereens. Except it's not very good. I wasn't really expecting a work of genius, but I was expecting something better than this.
Whilst it's all very noble and worthy to draw attention to the situation in Burma, this is really nothing more than a cheery slaughterhouse in which the Burmese military are portrayed as child murderers, rapists and genocidal maniacs, whose atrocities are so repulsive and despicable that you end up cheering on the collection of foul-mouthed mercenary types sent in to rescue a bunch of absurdly naive missionaries. Fortunately for both groups of clueless idiots, Mumblin' John Rambo and his crossbow tag along for a final reel of carnage and body parts.
Well, okay, although it's as screamingly unsubtle as you can get: irredeemable scumbags and saintly victims painted pure black-and-white; it's the kind of simplistic cartoon characterisation that kept the likes of Chuck Norris in stetsons for 30 years. After a while you just get bored with the cacklingly wicked Burmese slaughtering, raping and torturing, and that's surely not the idea. It puts the audience on the side of Rambo and the idiots simply because of the level of evil displayed by the other side.
Worse: since a lot of the blood and gore is done with obvious CG, it's rather like watching someone play a particularly senseless shoot-em-up video game in which the deaths of a couple of hundred people is reduced to pixels. In addition, the sound mix (at least at my local last night) was appalling: an early conversation between Rambo and the cute girly missionary in the pouring rain was almost inaudible, and a lot of the music sounded warbling and distorted, as if it was recorded on an old C-90 cassette and dunked in the river. (The music score isn't really very good either - a few quotes of Jerry Goldsmith's original themes apart, it's nondescript, and backed with a lot of percussion.) Rambo isn't the worst film of the year so far (that's Balls Of Fury) but it's still pretty terrible.
It's also easily described in onomatopeia. Basically it runs something like this:
Bang bang bang sniffle scream cackle cackle. Mumble mumble hissssss (rain). Chug chug chug BANG BANG BANG aaargh sob sob. Mumble mumble swear swear swear. Bang bang bangbangbangbangbangbang thwap (crossbow). Trudge trudge bangbangbangbangbangbangbangbang KABOOM!!!!!! Bang aaargh bang aaargh bang aaargh bang BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG AAAARGH!!!!!!! BOOM!!!! (Pause.) Sob sob sniffle. The end.
Whilst it's all very noble and worthy to draw attention to the situation in Burma, this is really nothing more than a cheery slaughterhouse in which the Burmese military are portrayed as child murderers, rapists and genocidal maniacs, whose atrocities are so repulsive and despicable that you end up cheering on the collection of foul-mouthed mercenary types sent in to rescue a bunch of absurdly naive missionaries. Fortunately for both groups of clueless idiots, Mumblin' John Rambo and his crossbow tag along for a final reel of carnage and body parts.
Well, okay, although it's as screamingly unsubtle as you can get: irredeemable scumbags and saintly victims painted pure black-and-white; it's the kind of simplistic cartoon characterisation that kept the likes of Chuck Norris in stetsons for 30 years. After a while you just get bored with the cacklingly wicked Burmese slaughtering, raping and torturing, and that's surely not the idea. It puts the audience on the side of Rambo and the idiots simply because of the level of evil displayed by the other side.
Worse: since a lot of the blood and gore is done with obvious CG, it's rather like watching someone play a particularly senseless shoot-em-up video game in which the deaths of a couple of hundred people is reduced to pixels. In addition, the sound mix (at least at my local last night) was appalling: an early conversation between Rambo and the cute girly missionary in the pouring rain was almost inaudible, and a lot of the music sounded warbling and distorted, as if it was recorded on an old C-90 cassette and dunked in the river. (The music score isn't really very good either - a few quotes of Jerry Goldsmith's original themes apart, it's nondescript, and backed with a lot of percussion.) Rambo isn't the worst film of the year so far (that's Balls Of Fury) but it's still pretty terrible.
It's also easily described in onomatopeia. Basically it runs something like this:
Bang bang bang sniffle scream cackle cackle. Mumble mumble hissssss (rain). Chug chug chug BANG BANG BANG aaargh sob sob. Mumble mumble swear swear swear. Bang bang bangbangbangbangbangbang thwap (crossbow). Trudge trudge bangbangbangbangbangbangbangbang KABOOM!!!!!! Bang aaargh bang aaargh bang aaargh bang BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG AAAARGH!!!!!!! BOOM!!!! (Pause.) Sob sob sniffle. The end.