End of the road
Toby Young
Rambo
18, Nationwide Is nothing sacred? Rambo, the patron saint of the American conservative movement, has become a liberal. When we last encountered this Reagan-era action hero, he was helping the mujahedin kick the Russians out of Afghanistan — and before that, in Rambo: First Blood Part II, he was rescuing forgotten American POWs from a Vietnamese labour camp. This time round, in an instalment written and directed by Sylvester Stallone, he’s fighting the military junta in Burma. What’s next? Will Rambo join forces with Hugo Chávez to protect Venezuela from the forces of American imperialism?
When Rambo opens, we find our eponymous hero living quietly on the Thai– Burmese border, earning a living as a harpoon fisherman and snake wrangler. In a few short scenes, we’re given to understand that 20 years of this peaceful, sedentary life have left him an embittered cynic, the Humphrey Bogart of South-East Asia. The Ingrid Bergman figure who awakens him from this slumber is a pretty Christian aid worker who persuades him to ferry a group of her colleagues to a refugee camp on the Burmese side of the border. It isn’t long before they’re captured by a brutal local commander — we know he’s a Really Bad Guy because he is the only character in the film who smokes — and Rambo decides to join forces with a bunch of mercenaries to mount a rescue mission. As he puts it, channelling Jean-Paul Sartre, it is better to die for something than live for nothing.
To be fair, Rambo has not become a cardcarrying member of Amnesty International. He believes in more direct methods of freeing prisoners of conscience than writing letters to the Guardian and this is easily the most violent of the four Rambo films, with a surfeit of exploding heads and severed limbs. It also has a few wonderfully politically incorrect touches, such as underlining just how wicked the Burmese commander is by having him frogmarch an adolescent boy into his tent. (Homosexual = Evil.) But the decision to set the film in South-East Asia and have Rambo take on the Burmese military junta — as opposed to good old-fashioned communists — robs the franchise of its right-wing allure. In his previous three outings, there was something gloriously unfashionable about Rambo, as if the filmmakers had deliberately set out to bait the liberal media. In this instalment, by contrast, not even the New York Times has objected to his choice of enemy. (The paper’s lead critic, A.O. Scott, complimented Rambo on its ‘block-headed poetry’.) It could be worse, I suppose. At one stage, Sylvester Stallone announced that Rambo IV would focus on ‘environmental concerns’. Has the sexagenarian actor finally decided to become respectable? Back when the first Rambo film came out, over a quarter of a century ago, his only rivals in the right-wing action stakes were Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now that the former has become America’s Greatest Living Director and the latter governor of California, Stallone may think that the time has come for him to renounce his controversial past.
Then again, he may just be scraping the bottom of the barrel. After unsuccessful attempts to reinvent himself as a comedian (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) and a serious actor (Cop Land), Stallone has been reduced to appearing as a ‘Special Guest Star’ in Las Vegas, a long-running TV show, and producing his own reality series (The Contender). Two years ago, he squeezed one last film out of the Rocky franchise — the sixth, if I’m not mistaken — so it comes as no surprise that he has decided to dust off the Rambo franchise as well. Like the battle-scarred Vietnam vet, whom we see returning to his family farm at the end of the film, Stallone has finally come to the end of the road.
Silver Surfers may enjoy watching the 61-year-old perform all his own stunts, but it should be noted that they are considerably less demanding than they were in Rambo’s last outing. Indeed, Stallone the director tiptoes around Stallone the actor, sparing him the indignity of having to do anything too strenuous or, worse, remove his shirt. He can still run through a forest at a tidy clip, but the wet work with a Commando Knife is largely a thing of the past. Perhaps that’s the reason there are no helicopters in this film: Stallone is simply too old to jump out of them.
Now that the sinner has repented, will Hollywood’s liberal gatekeepers allow him into heaven? I see a Lifetime Achievement Award in his future.
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