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"But wait," you must be thinking. "Didn't we already do Rambo months ago?" No no no. That was First Blood. Followed by Rambo: First Blood 2, and Rambo 3. This is just plain ol' Rambo. The fourth movie. I think we may now have a naming convention mess even WORSE than the Wonder Boy/Monster World mess. I wasn't originally planning to watch this one, being from 2008 and, surely, much tamer than the original movies. I've been told though that it has just as much over the top violence, maybe even moreso! So... let's see if he actually starts deflecting bullets with his skin or firing 3 exploding arrows at a time or somesuch craziness. Well... we DO start off with him hunting cobras with his bare hands, and using a bow as an improvized harpoon launcher to catch big ol' river fish in tailand, so that's something.
Man, apparently Rambo here has become some kind of MMORPG character. He comes back to town with his bag of cobras, hands them to the guy who wanted them, and is immediately asked to go out and gather some pythons next. Now here's some random honkies wanting him to use his boat to take them to Burma so they can do humanitarian work. He doesn't want to take any quests that require going to another zone yet though. Better get this snake chain finished up first. Then he wanders off to work on his Blacksmith Profession. Now here's some bad dudes killing some innocent villagers to prove how evil they are. Also, subtitles on most of the dialog here. Not on Rambo's though, which is a shame, because I'm not 100% fluent in his native tongue of Slurrymumble.
Anyway, the people who want to hitch a ride really aren't going to give up on this. It's like, Will you give us a boat ride? No. But thou must! No. But thou must! No. But thou must! Fine! I'll take you to Mt. Splashmore! Seriously though, like, a full day at least went by here. Nobody else in the area has a boat? For that matter, there wasn't a better place to get a boat from? I mean, that village didn't really strike me as airport adjacent. Anyway, I'm sure this will be a simple taxiing job, then he'll go home and the rest of the movie will be about snake collecting and blacksmithing. Nothing at all is going to happen here that'll lead to- and the machine gun fire starts before I can even finish the joke. Apparently they're getting boarded by pirates! Wasn't their whole rationalization being that he knows this river better than anyone else, and can avoid all the dangers of it?
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... and then when the pirates say they want Token Girl, the only character Rambo seems to care about because... it's an action movie and that's how action movies go, he makes all the pirates' heads explode. Yeah I know, threw me for a sec too, but seriously, with totally preposterous speed he pulls a pistol out from somewhere, and within like half a second has shot half a dozen pirates with special skull-exploding rounds. Lead Honky thinks killing people is wrong. Because apparently he doesn't understand that this is Rambo he's talking to and we can therefore expect a body count in at LEAST the triple digits. Seriously though. You checked this guy out right? You found out he was apparently the Awesomest Boat Guy ever, and kinda spoke English, right? Nobody mentioned how he was Rambo during any of this? I don't know, maybe I'm just giving Lead Honky too much credit. But anyway, Rambo goes and blows the pirates' boat up while the gang are all doing their medical relief schtick. Because heck if he's going to leave evidence to get in trouble with when Lead Honky goes and narcs on him for killing bunches of dudes.
Token girl is giving aid and looking empathetic. Then stuff starts exploding again. The bad guys are deciding this is the day to mortar the heck out of this village. Lots of buildings explode from direct impacts. A few other direct impacts cause some people to explode, which is one of the simple joys of the special effects industry. Actually, this is a pretty awesomely chaotic and deplorably violent raid here. We've got kids getting stabbed and shot, people exploding, some dude's running around with a flamethrower, limbs are being hacked off with machetes, someone just chucked another little kid directly into the path of the flame thrower... basically the entire population is brutally slaughtered. Except, of course, for Token Girl. Who is totally unharmed and taken prisoner. Which I really have to point out as silly when one of the local village girls was getting raped in the background. Don't think there were boobs though. I mean, we're well past paragraph 3 so one can assume there weren't.
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Anyway, we cut to... a black and white montage of flashbacks to earlier movies' flashbacks to conversations about how awesome Rambo is. Like, the bit from the first movie where he's in his cave getting all prepared and they have his boss in flash-back-speech talking about how cool he is? Yeah that. Apparently this was him having a dream or something. Yeah, see what a troubled tortured soul Rambo is? Every night he dreams about people talking about how awesome he is. Now he's inner monologuing about how apparently he just plain likes killing people and he's totally cool with it, while he makes a sword. Between the dream and sword making, some guy came along to tell him he has to go rescue and/or avenge those missionaries. Along with some international mercenary types. We've got Angry Australian guy, we've got Bearded Asian American guy, we've got Kindly British Kid with 5 o'clock shadow. We've got Grungy bearded guy. We've got White Guy with hair gel. Did I miss anyone? No? OK moving on then.
Here's Girl, looking totally unabused, tied up in a nice clean wooden shack with nice lighting. Here's the other surviving missionaries all beaten and muddy and kept in a bamboo cage. These shots were literally back to back. Seriously, she might as well have a big sign around her neck saying "I'm The Chick so nothing really bad is allowed to happen to me!" Oh, and British Kid I Gave Too Long A Name is officially nicknamed Schoolboy, which will come in really handy if I ever have reason to mention him again. Angry Aussie by the way does not seem to care for Rambo particularly much. Also, Grungy Merc kinda looks like Tom Savini. Oh, apparently Rambo isn't officially here to KILL EVERYONE, he's just giving the mercs a ride. Because he's still Awesome Boat Guy. Apparently. Seriously though, don't mean to harp on this, but how high is the upper limit on being great at piloting a river boat? You don't steer into the shore, you occasionally dock, and after docking, probably have to turn around. I'm not saying it requires NO skill, but it's a weird thing to have as an Informed Attribute.
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So yeah, the mercs don't let Rambo come along to kill dudes with'em. Meanies. We're pretty clearly delineating the decent kindly mercs and the jerk mercs here by how they react to oh hey this town we were sent to rescue people at is just heads on poles and hanged dudes and enough ruins to hang dudes from. Now here come some badguys with some prisoners tossing grenades into the rice paddies and then forcing them to run across. Oh yeah, this kinda came up earlier. Apparently their deal is that they mostly kill everyone in a village, but keep the young dudes to train as soldiers b making thme run across grenade filled rice paddies. Now here's Rambo killing all of them with his bow. So is he like, officially just an archer now? I mean, originally the bow was just pulled out because it's weird and outlandish and not a bad system for delivering explosives across long distances with great accuracy, but every movie seems to have him using it more and more. I mean, killing 5 or so trained soldiers who are all standing out in the open with nobody around them? Guns are probably better for that than a bow. I mean, yeah, OK, a bow's quieter, but it's not like they had any reaction time anyway.
So yeah, the mercs now recognize Rambo as their rightful leader by virtue of him being an amazing archer, so he calls the shots now. Specifically, driving a truck right into the badguys' REALLY LAME USO show and telling everyone to "go" and hop out at various intervals. Seriously though, we've got a makeshift stage, it's got 5 girls on it, they don't have costumes, there's no music, they're just kinda silently and apathetically waving their arms in front of them, like the silliest part of the Thriller dance but without the enthusiasm of zombies. I mean, seriously, even if you're angry genocidey dudes cut off from civilization and all you have for show girls are some traumatized prisoners? That's not your best entertainment option. I'm sure like, the guy who was throwing toddlers at the flamethrower guy can do a quick ten minutes of serviceable standup or something. See, this guy gets it. He just jumped up on stage and is tossing the girls off towards the crowd while showing some showmanship about it. That'll presumably lead into some offscreen raping or something, but it still beats the Apathetic Arm Sway Hour for entertainment. Also, I should probably be focusing on the actual action stuff going on here not the diversion, but... OK, guys are sneaking around. Every so often Rambo stabs someone. You aren't missing much.
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OK, now Schoolboy is sniping some guards, and Tom Savini is rescuing some nameless NPCs, and Girl is being dragged off to a more dramatic rescue situation. Also, hey now movie! I said OFF-camera raping! Also I just saw boobs making their first confirmable appearance and we are well beyond the point where we have random nudity for no good reason! How dare you break with tradition! Also- yon should be off camera scene had someone set off this cool red smoke generator in it, apparently purely for the sake of looking kinda neat. Wasn't the mercs doing it, just some bored guy. Also? Lead Honky just went oh thank god when being rescued, so Angry Aussie tossed him in the mud and kicked him and held a knife to his throat and said "God didn't save you! We did!" Kind of a weird time to be such an assertive atheist there Double A, but it is rude when people misapply credit like that I suppose. Oh, and we had some more nice head explodery what with the sniping.
So now everyone's running through the woods the next day, being chased by jeeps. Wh didn't you steal one of those jeeps again? Oh and someone just got mud on the camera. It's really noticeable and this wasn't being shot all documentary style so it's weird they didn't do a second take or digitally remove it or something. And.... what did you say Rambo? Gimme that flamewater? Oh, maybe it was claymore. As in a mine. Where did that term come from anyway? Hmm... what should we name this powerful explosive after? How about a big sword! That's just confusing. It's like, what if we had some groovy VTOL jet and we called it a biplane? I mean, yeah, you aren't likely going to see THOSE biplanes in the same sort of setting as actual biplanes, but they're both designed for a close enough purpose that you can't go "biplane the plane or biplane the different plane?" and would have to specify with a much more detailed description.
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Anyway though, he used it to make a trap for bad guys with the mine. Then people escape some more. Not so much AA though, he's getting all tortured with a spear jammed into his leg and twisted. Basically, all the mercs who were jerks are about to be killed. But heeeere's Rambo. He just kinda slowly popped up behind some guy. It was really goofy. Said guy was formerly in possession of a machinegun embankment, so, Rambo now officially has More Dakka. Also, Schoolboy just shot a couple guys with a single bullet. They fell down in different directions. This is kind of a goofy fight scene in general. So... yeah. I can't really say much for an extended period of everyone grabbing assault rifles and shooting at each other. Oh good, here's some reels arriving to help. Not that they need it. I mean, the good guys here have already killed like, 20 dudes each (plus Rambo's personal count of... I want to say 80?) and not one good guy has dropped. Oh. That's what the rebels are here for. Evening the body count. A boat with a flame thrower comes by and just kinda roasts a ton of them. Now here's just Rambo hooting everyone with hi stationary gun, and Schoolboy getting to make someone else's head explode. Completely this time, nothing left above the neck.
And... all the badguys are now dead. I think that's actually pretty much it. Here's someone running out to be happy Token Girl is safe. And... yeah. Here's Rambo going home to his... horrse farm in America? With his original going home clothes from the first movie? That... totally fails to make any sense. Hasn't he been living in some backwater snake farming village for like, the last 20 years? With no desire at all to return to America? What was it about killing this particular army that changed that? Also, seriously, this movie's whole plot: Some people get a ride from Rambo. Then they get kidnapped by an evil army. Then Rambo saves them and kills the evil army. The end. Talk about a simple plot structure. Only way it could be simpler would be if we just started off with "these people need saving!" and then saved them. Which would be so minimalist it might swing around to cool.
