I Hated It

Rambo 4, that is. Just, ugh. The reviews I've read since seeing it--I never read reviews in advance, for other reasons--fault its absence of plot, and its...shall we say...over reliance on gore to carry scene after scene. One reviewer said there weren't enough shots of John Rambo running through the woods and engaging in cleverer-than-thou guerrilla-style war tactics. In other words, not enough straight up bad-ass Rambo action. Being the Mudgeon I so avowedly am, I couldn't disagree more. Well, that might be somewhat of an overstatement. The plot was definitely weakish and it was extremely gory. The latter is really all I had heard about the film before seeing it. As a fan of the earlier three films, though, and a sort of connoisseur of gore, I didn't let these warnings bother me. What nobody told me was how deeply regressive the film was.

Let me clarify. In the first three films, John Rambo is a Vietnam vet struggling to find a place in a world from which he feels radically alienated. The source of this alienation is the violence, betrayal, and treachery that he has personally and vicariously experienced at the hands of the U.S. government. He has seen the horrors of a politically misguided war, and has been transformed by them. He's sort of the Gothic product of an American war machine, the self-stated ethos of which is to make the world a better, safe, and more prosperous place. He creeps out from the shadow of whatever national mission statement and articulates (well, grunt-screams) a very different story. He knows, for example, that violence and war, in some sense, serve only themselves. That father-figures--in the form of commanders, generals, what have you--espouse benevolence and care, but are just as likely to leave you in the very maw of danger and certain death as to kill you themselves. He knows that for all the government praises the importance and honor in service, soldiers are ultimately expendable, but during and after they are "used."

The first film engages the trauma of the Vietnam veteran in a kind of national allegory, perhaps, of a nation very much divided, inwardly torn. The second and third films feature Rambo fighting--extremely reluctantly--once again on the behalf of the U.S. in the service of a third party. In the second film he rescues P.O.W.s left behind in Vietnam, no thanks to the military. In the third, he helps aid Afghan freedom fighters in their struggle with the Soviets. That film is dedicated to the "gallant people of Afghanistan." Trautman, Rambo's primary contact and former commanding officer, explicitly likens the misguided efforts of Russians in Afghanistan to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam Conflict. In both the second and third films, Rambo works as an independent operative, serving a higher calling (truth, freedom, justice) through the expedient means of the U.S. military operations. The sense in both is that he is hugely bigger than the latter and could probably settle things by himself. There is some vestigial soldier logic here, of course. No matter what way you slice it, Rambo is always saving white Americans from Others of various derivations. While he always has these rescue missions as his surface motivation, the deeper logic of the films is much more complicated and gets very much to the core of a problematized humanist military ethics. In other words, while performing fairly cohesive missions, there's always this sense that Rambo is really fighting for the greater good in spite of the nation he ambiguously serves.

If I haven't already bored you, I'll now tell you what is wrong with Rambo 4. He's living in Thailand (where he is at the beginning of both the second and third films, incidentally), doing an excellently surly ex-pat thing when he's sucked into saving some Christian missionaries who are captured bringing aid to the Burmese people. His pessimism is acute, and there's a sense that he wouldn't have bothered with the rescue mission at all if it hadn't been for the naive, pollyanna appeals of an angelically white Julie Benz (watch out, Rambo! she's a vampire!). She actually gives him a small cross--the only payment he'll accept for his services--and he wears it wrapped around his wrist during the remainder of the film. She asks him some apparently soul-searching question about why he never went home. Rambo says his father's alive in Arizona, he thinks, but he doesn't really know. He gives her his typically stoney-faced response and doesn't reply. Clearly, though, we're supposed to know that this has been a life-altering moment. Apparently he doesn't have a good reason for not going home, and this question never occurred to him. Why not just go home? (Forget the first film all together, apparently.) After he discovers they've--or, really, SHE's--been captured, there's a horrible scene with him making a machete (which he never uses, preferring instead the bow and arrow and the gatling gun). Picture a blacksmith forge. Lots of steam and red hot metal. Super sweaty, roid-tastic, Stallone, banging away at said mysterious weapon. Cue the voiceover about how he knows deep down he's built for war. He's good at it. He likes it. Don't fight it.

Then the violence and exploding heads. Throats ripped out. Evisceration. Babies on bayonets. Hey, that has a nice ring to it! Limbs torn off. What have you. The villains (Burmese army) are (almost) completely irredeemable, aside from a bit of information about how they are recruited. The leader is the worst of all of course. A sadist and pedophile who makes games out of killing civilians. They keep people in cages, put heads on stakes, the whole nine. And these soldiers die horrible deaths. About half the missionaries, plus Julie Benz, make it out alive. If Rambo weren't quite so monstrous, it seems, Julie would have been the romantic interest. But as it stands...not so much. In the final scenes, he's walking down a road in a pastoral American setting. Blue jeans, army duffel bag, just like in the opening of the first movie. Except here, instead of picking fights with asshole town sheriffs, he's going home. He turns down a small dirt road leading to a prosperous-looking ranch behind an appropriately dilapidated mailbox labeled "Rambo." The end.

No vision. No politics. No engagement with the other films beyond a nod to Rambo's experience with torture. The U.S. government is conspicuously absent and the sense here is that, unlike these stupid missionaries who are barely able to escape with their lives, daddy (the U.S.) is smart enough to stay away. The world is a very very very dark and scary place. The best thing, by far, for Americans--both those as lily-white and sweet as Julie Benz and those as rugged and laconic as Rambo--is to go home and stay home. Home is safe and good and pure. Finally, Rambo finds peace in the rural hills of Arizona. With his real, not his surrogate, father. Or maybe these are still the same thing. In that case, the bad father from the first three films has become a benevolent, stay-at-home dad.