The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [8.5 out of 10]

Rambo is a visceral, serious, action packed movie about the rescue of Christian missionaries from war-torn Burma and it’s military.

Stallone’s execution of this movie is so raw and completely devoid of cheesy lines or “typical action hero” antics that you can’t help but walk out of the theater with respect for him and the movie for telling the story the way they did.

Background

While this movie is certainly based on the fictional “Rambo” character Sylvester Stallone created in the 80s for First Blood, the foundation of the movie (both the location and political/war situation in Burma) are accurately portrayed and true.

Stallone actually took quite a bit of flack during the making of this movie (which was filmed in Burma), saying he was demonizing the Burmese people; his point was that he was demonizing the military, not the people.

I have to agree with Stallone. When you watch the movie, you feel for the people, but you do get a very detailed depiction of how brutal the Burmese army is and it’s complete disregard for life of any kind.

There is one flash back in the movie where Rambo is “dreaming” bits and pieces of his past from other Rambo movies… moments that have made him who he is, besides that, this movie stands firmly on it’s own with no need to even be aware that there were movies before it.

Comments on the Story

The movie opens with sufficient attention paid to setting up the “climate” of Burma for the viewer to understand what takes place later and why it’s so brutal and not actually showing the Rambo character until further in.

This movie did an excellent job of not putting Rambo on a pedestal and shining a spot light at him the entire time, like is typical with a big action movie. There is quite a bit of effort put into developing and showing the other characters in action that work with Rambo, which I found made the entire movie more believable and realistic as opposed to the historical “1 man army” that I was expecting.

There were no points in the movie where Rambo picked up a machine gun and fought a helicopter or hopped in a jet and blew anyone up and the movie surely didn’t open with a scene of him street fighting in the back alleys of Thailand like Rambo 2 did. This movie was just a raw depiction of “Here’s an X-War hero, Here’s a conflict, and he gets involved along with these other people… here’s what happens”.

I also want to add, however weird this may seem, that the movie does not try and pack up “cheap thrills” by showing any detailed rape scenes or nudity (except for a breast for honestly 1/5th of a second?) as a result of woman being captured by the army. We both noticed that the movie avoided this typical tactic used to pull in male viewers and were impressed… because the movie didn’t need it and wouldn’t have benefited from it.

Story

The premise of this movie is that John Rambo (Stallone) has “retired” either on the border of Burma or right inside Burma is a small fishing community. He does menial tasks around the water and country side collecting snakes for the local Tai snake show for money here and there and really seems to just hate life, people and want to be left the fuck alone.

A group of Christian missionaries from Colorado show up, lead by Paul Schulze (Michael), and want a lift into Burma to provide medical and spiritual relief to the villagers there who are getting massacred every day there by the military.

Rambo originally objects, pushing the point that without guns they won’t make a difference. Julie Benz (Sarah) pushes for them to go anyway and eventually gets her way. Rambo agrees to take the group but makes it clear he’s only doing it for Sarah (Michael has been a dismissive douche-bag to Rambo up to this point).

As they make their way up the river, they run into pirates who try and take Sarah, this is the first moment in the movie that Rambo shows his true colors and dispatches of the pirates quickly and effortlessly. The missionaries blast him for such “unnecessary violence” and it’s the first moment in the movie where the message is clearly given that to get anything done in this area, it takes a gun, not words.

Rambo drops the missionaries off who set to work helping a small village out. It’s a day or so later that one of the heads of the missionary show up at Rambo’s house to ask if he can take a band of mercenaries up river to the same spot the missionaries were dropped off to help go find them, because they lost contact.

NOTE: Normally in big budget movies, like Transformers, the military personal are scripted to act like complete jackasses to make the performance of the main actor shine. Thankfully in Rambo, the script doesn’t placate you like a child, and the mercs actually act like trained mercs with some impressive moves and performances of their own. I really appreciated this touch.

Rambo takes the mercs up there and goes with them to rescue the missionaries. I’m skipping over a lot of character interaction here because I enjoyed not knowing about it, so I don’t want to ruin it for you.

The mercs and Rambo find the missionaries and extract them, but come sun-up, the military discovers that their captives are gone and pursue them.

The remainder of the movie is one of the most satisfying battles I’ve seen in a movie before.

… yes I just bolded an entire sentence. But it’s true… the whole rest of the movie is the group trying to escape and fighting off the army in a truly awesome fashion. My wife and I were saying “OH SHIT!” or “OHHHHHH!!!” every few mins until the movie came to a close.

Thank you Stallone for not pulling any punches with this movie… it was awesome to watch for folks that love raw action like this, and not PG-13 bullshit action that is found in so many other war movies.

NOTE: You can equate this to the first time you saw Saving Private Ryan, and were disturbed by how “real” it felt… that’s what I’m talking about here, as opposed to watching something like Beverly Hills Cop.

Watching Rambo reminded me of the first time I played Gears of War and chainsawed someone, remember that feeling?

Special Effects & Sound

I’m about to make a sweeping statement here that could have ramifications throughout my office clear into the next office… and here they are:

Rambo has both the best gun shot sounds and depiction of gun shot wounds and gun shot effects in any movie (action or otherwise) that I’ve seen.

Let me elaborate…

If you are into guns and know the difference between a Glock 17 and a Desert Eagle .50 or maybe a Scout and a PSG-1 or Barrett you are likely constantly disappointed or at least notice the disproportionate damage particular guns do in movies.

For example, we just reviewed Shoot ‘Em Up and noted how underpowered Giamatti’s Desert Eagle is in the movie.

At one point he shoots one of his employees in the buttocks as a reminder to not screw up. For the folks in the know, you recognize that shooting someone in the ass with a DE .50 would blow their pelvis into pieces… check out this movie, and scroll to the 30 second mark and see what a .50 does to a watermelon:

Another example, if you are a person that watched Smokin’ Aces and were thrilled with the scene of the sniper in the hotel across the street shooting the Barrett sending people flying across the room, then Rambo will give you a giant gun-boner.

NOTE: Texans may be hospitalized for gun-related-boners after watching this.

This movie depicts exactly what you would expect a Barrett to do to people, or a mounted high-caliber machine gun to do to people… there are no “oh no I’m shot in the arm” moments in this movie… it’s more like “There goes my FACE… I better go catch it”.

In addition to the visuals for the guns in this movie, the sound work done as well as the environmental effects used to annunciate the weapons were just brilliant. You’ll know what I mean when you see it, but the scenes just feel so visceral and powerful.

Being a fan of horror-movie gore, I really enjoyed myself, but even my wife was blown away by the voracity the power of the delivery.

There is no gratuotis gore in this movie, in fact, in a few scenes where I thought there would be, there wasn’t. So when it does happen, it’s about as raw as you could want it.

Conclusion [8.5 out of 10]

If you read the review up to this point… or even just looked at the score I’m not sure what else to write here: the movie was awesome.

Gritty, real, raw and unflinching… this is grown up Rambo, this is not 80s, campy, all-star-action-hero Rambo… he’s dead, and I love Stallone for killing him off.

That being said, if you don’t like movies like this, you likely won’t like this one. If you hated Saving Private Ryan for the gore and grittyness of it, or Blackhawk Down, you probably aren’t going to like Rambo.

If you watch movies like Aliens vs Predator: Requiem just to see how people/aliens/predators are going to die and get a good snicker out of a sweet death scene, I think you’ll love the gore in Rambo, and really appreciate the quality presentation of the movie in the process.

Areas of Improvement

As with all our reviews, if we don’t give something a 10 out of 10, we have to justify it.

I’ll be honest, it was really hard to come up with these items, as I just wasn’t sure how to make the movie better than what it already was, these are the best items I could come up with:

• More gore. The gore that is there is awesome, but my wife and I both thought we were going to see more of it, maybe just 1 extra scene of it or something.

… and that’s it. I tried to figure this section out for about 30mins and this is all I could come up with. Sorry to disappoint if you were looking for a laundry list of shittiness, it just wasn’t there.

Go see this movie with confidence that it’s good.