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So, last week, when I mentioned that whole Survival Mode bit from the boxed set Rambo trilogy that DVD came from, I never really actually looked at it. Or rather, I did, but failed to mention it. The third movie here has it too, and it really is videogame-y mode. Baddies hiding in trees get highlighted with crosshairs, you can pull up a cruddy mini-map at times, and every time he finds a new weapon, a box pops up with its description and stats. It's pretty impressively cheesy. Said third movie incidentally really is just called "Rambo III." So... technically we totally skipped a movie here. If we have First Blood, then First Blood 2: Rambo, this would be First Blood 3: Rambo 2. And then people would drop the First Blood 3 and call it Rambo 2, and then by extension claim that the original First Blood wasn't really part of the Shadow Hearts series... and what do you mean I'm projecting?
Anyway, we start off with Rambo in some sort of.... stick fighting arena inan unspecified Asian country, totally looking like Sylvester Stallone was totally out of shape when he made this movie and is wearing an unconvincing fake muscle suit. I think it's actually creepier if that's really him though, as it's rather red and leathery when compared to his face. Anyway, Trout Man is looking for him, but after forgetting that this was Rambo and not Rocky for a while, he sneaks out the back to go to the buddhist monastery he's living in... or maybe it's a secret weather control device being built by monks. Because that is totally a giant tower being built. Yes, buddhist monks. If you have a troubled past, going to live with buddhist monks is the time tested method to magically make you at peace with it... on paper. I've never actually seen anything that used that gimmick and had any noticeable effect on the stress levels or lifestyle of the character in question. Ever. Our actual plot here though is that Trout Man wants Rambo to go to Afghanistan to, you know, be in another Rambo movie. Rambo says no thanks, I'm cool hitting people with sticks and building weather control towers. Trout Man counters with what manages to be a fairly sappy speech about how Rambo is an inhumane killing machine who can only ever be happy sneaking through the wilderness slashing people's throats. You'd think that'd totally work right? But no. He's just going to sit here all mopey and they'll just have to send regular soldier types in. And apparently Trout Man himself.
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This leads to a helicopter blowing up all their trucks and killing all their red shirts, THEN the pilot saying in a really really unconvincing Russian accent that they don't want a fight, and will take everyone in unharmed if they drop their weapons. See, in your country, show of force follows demands, but in Soviet Russia, demands follow show of force! So yeah. Now Rambo has to go rescue his... only person he ever actually has a proper conversation with in this series. Kids, this is what we call railroading in RPG circles. Presumably if he wasn't willing to go rescue his boss, the monks would get kidnapped, and then someone would just conk him over the head and dump him right at the entrance to the dungeon. Anyway, now we're in this rather painful scene where he's getting supplies and directions from some guy just so someone can be all "you're just one guy, and you don't look so tough! There's no way you can singlehandedly kill your way through a whole Russian military base!" I really just hate scenes like this in general. They are excessively common in sequels and such, and it's even worse when they're totally baseless. Like the modern run of Doctor Who? People are constantly all "Do you know who that is? That's The Doctor. Check your history books and you'll see that he's an unstoppable force of awesome who always wins no matter what he sets out to do." And then, you know, we have The Doctor just kinda running and hiding from monsters and stalling for time and giving inspirational speeches to whatever NPC is around who ACTUALLY has the ability to do something about the monster of the week. I mean, the only thing he legitimately has going for him is being the main character.
Oh right, Rambo 3! Yeah, we're actually wasting a pretty long hunk of time here on wandering over to the base and talking about Afghan fun facts, and scenes of Trout Man getting tortured. So hey, I'm sending an e-mail here that's constantly saying Afghanistan, torture, and mentioning how various people are going to die, which will go up on a web page when it's done. So I'd like to take this time to say hello to the paranoid government types illegally intercepting and scanning through my private ramblings. This is just a movie review of sorts, but while I have your attention, might I suggest you consider going to the official World Domination home page and buying a copy of The Massive Vs. The Masses, currently on sale for just $25? There might be secret terrorist plots hidden in the rules! Anyway though, yeah, getting back to the movie, this scene here is actually rather interesting to watch today. We're totally making the people of Afghanistan, and the mujahideen in particular, are all proud and noble, and going on about how horribly they're being treated by the occupying soldiers, and how the world really needs to know this so they can properly sympathize. It's the sort of thing that makes people with too little knowledge trying to argue about politics feel really awkward one way or another. This transitions into an extra surreal scene where in order to bond with the kindly rebels, Rambo engages in their local sport. The one where you ride around with an animal corpse and try to toss it in a ring. This too goes on for quite a while, and it looks like Rambo is totally going to win, when all of the sudden one of those Soviet helicopters starts following everyone along and indiscriminately blowing up uh... pretty much everything there is to blow up. So yeah. Stuff blows up for a while. People are swiss cheesed by machine-gun fire. Then eventually Rambo drops his sheep corpse, gets off his horse, finds himself a really big gun just kinda sitting around and uh.... doesn't actually accomplish anything with it. I mean, the helicopter leaves after a bit of shooting at it, but it's already kinda blown up everything and killed almost everyone, so I don't think you can really take credit for that.
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So now one of the survivors is all "See? Look how horrible and dishonorable these evil Russians are! I mean, who just takes an attack helicopter into a base with no warning and indiscriminately blows up everything in sight and kills everyone?" Yes Rambo. Who would do such a thing? Certainly not someone properly honorable like you. Except you know, for that scene in the previous movie where you did exactly that and all. Anyway, moving along, it's time to cross a mine field. As the Metal Gear series teaches us, that sounds like a really scary thing to do but as long as you just crawl the whole time, you have no chance of blowing up and get to snatch up free land mines to use later! Also, the cute little 9 year old soldier he met at the camp is tagging along to be our Short Round for the evening. Yes, that's right people of 20 years later. We have a child soldier from a self-admittedly religious fanatical local resistance movement and he's our cute comic relief for our Woo! American soldiers are AWESOME movie. I'm not trying to make any specific point here, I'm just saying that simplified politics+time=hilarity. Also, now that we're actually in the base, I have to say it's pretty neat looking. Apparently, the Russians are recycling an old dungeon left over from the crusades... and are also torturing someone with a freaking flame thrower. I'm pretty sure you can't actually do that, because flame throwers are not, in fact, giant lighters, they're actually super-soakers full of sticky flammable gunk, with a lighter on the end. So you can't so much burn someone a little as, you know, hose them down with flaming goo.
Anyway, Trout Man found! Time for a lot of explosions and gunfire! I actually saw a statistical breakdown of every movie in the series the other day. This movie averages 1.3 deaths per minute, 2.4 if you just start counting from the happy rebel base getting blown to bits. More significantly is the "Sequences in which Rambo is shot at without significant result: 38." like right now for instance, he's standing in an incredibly narrow sewer tunnel, planting explosives, while pursuing soldiers are laying down fully automatic fire right at him. Nothing comes close to hitting him. This is in no way atypical of how this movie consistently goes. Guys in guard towers, with a spotlight and stationary gun, can you shoot the guys standing next to the horses 20 meters away? No, of course not. Oh and by the way, Trout Man is STILL all Rambo is Awesome Incarnate while being tortured. Because that's his thing he says. Anyway though, according to yon statistical breakdown, this movie has twice the general levels of violence as the second one, but only HALF the body count of that new one from 2008, which, to be extra confusing, is just called "Rambo." The catch is that that number is just inflated by 138 good guy red shirts dying, and, as these statistics point out, not one of Rambo's 83 kills in that one takes place while he's running around with no shirt on, which is how everyone's mental image of the character tends to go, mainly because it's accurate.
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While I was rambling on about that, Rambo did the whole cleaning his own wounds bit, because apparently ONE of those few hundred bullets that should have hit him barely scraped his torso afterall. Now he's... sneaking into the base to rescue Trout Man? Uh... didn't he just finish doing that? It sure seemed like he did... I guess he just rescued someone at random then came back for everyone else the next day. So yeah, everyone is piling into a helicopter and flying off. How much you wanna bet a second helicopter starts chasing them around? Oh, or we can skip that and just have the helicopter crash as soon as it's over the wall... and then explode once everyone's clear. Because everything in this movie explodes. The random Afghans leave because apparently their house is right over there, while Rambo and Trout Man have to head off towards "the border." Of course, NOW the helicopter shows up, and while it's looking around, Rambo pulls some sticks out of his personal pocket dimension I guess, screws'em together, makes his bow, screws more together, makes an arrow, screws an exploding arrowhead out, and then, rather hilariously, he pops up from behind a mountain at eye level with a helicopter pilot who screams before boom.
Now he's stalking dudes with night vision goggles in a cave, taking them out with his bow and knife, and using their radios to taunt their commander. One soldier is killed by picking up a glow stick which is tied to a grenade, which is ALMOST as silly as, and quite likely the inspiration for, the Light Grenade scene from Mom and Dad Save the World. More people need to see that one. The main premise is that it takes place on a planet where everyone is ridiculously stupid and gullible, so one of their ultimate weapons is the Light Grenade, which causes anyone who picks it up to be vaporized in a flash of light... and the really deadly part is that it says "Pick me up" on the side. So you know, at one point about a hundred or so people in a row are killed by one, picking it up to explain to everyone behind them how the last guy died. Plus Evil Emperor Jon Lovitz. Oh yeah, and meanwhile, over here in Rambo 3, we just had someone shot with an exploding arrow, then someone else killed by pulling the pin on one of his grenades, and kicking him down a hole while his leg was tied to a rope, the other end of which was tied around a rock, too big to fit through the whole, leaving us with a guy suspended from the ceiling of a cave for a bit before exploding. Then we have Rambo and Trout Man staring down an entire army on an open field demanding their surrender. So they uh... just kinda shout no and proceed to kill them all. Which is exactly as stupid as it sounds, even though shortly after they begin dowing so, those unambiguously good rebels show up to help/die. This whole scene really just looks like a totally over the top spoof of a Rambo movie, which is impressive considering how normally, a Rambo movie already looks like a totally over the top spoof of a big splashy explosion filled action movie.
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... OK, I need a moment to process that one. I just saw a head on collision. Rambo had just stolen a tank, and was cruising around in it, before crashing into an oncoming helicopter. Apparently the movie had to stop and process that too, because that was the end of the big explosion filled action sequence, and now everyone is just standing around staring. Why was there a helicopter at ground level? How was it charging forward without scraping its propellers against the ground? Why couldn't he just shoot it down? Anyway though, "This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan" apparently. Word for word, that's the last thing we see before the credits roll. Again, I'm not trying to get political here, and I have nothing against anyone from Afghanistan, but this was seriously a movie just filled to the brim with the exact same sort of footage you would have in a modern movie about cartoonishly evil generic terrorists in a generic foreign desert type country, coming out of nowhere launching mortars at tanks and such, but we're calling them the good guys without batting an eye. I think, really, that says way less about shifting politics than it does about acceptable standards for movie violence. Popping out from places and blowing people up was just kinda par for the course in movies from the 80s. Even suburban 10 year olds did it. Just one of those things.
So anyway, that's the Rambo trilogy! There's also that relatively new one, but I'm not watching it. The current kick is ultraviolent 80s movies dagnabit. Not modern movies with some presumable attempt at taste and constraint. I still kinda regret not doing a blow by blow for Death Race though. That really was a sight to behold.
