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Friday 18 July 2008

End of the road

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 card-carrying 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’.)

More articles from: Toby Young | this section

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