The Young Turks

First of all, my criticism for the USA Today review. It was done by Claudia Puig. Claudia is obviously a woman. She is probably your average, everyday woman whom loves movies. As in my real life scenario, your typical woman is not a Rambo fan (as soon as I find one that is, I will probably marry her.) Therefore if you send in a woman to review a man’s film, it is going to get a bad review. It would be like asking me to review your typical chick flick. Truth About Cats and Dogs? Even though love Uma and Janeane, I would still give it one star tops. It was boring, stupid and predictable. I guess that’s the difference between a good guy flick, and a good chick flick. The boring part and in some cases for the best ones, the stupid part as well.

Back to Rambo now. For those of you whom haven’t seen a Rambo movie in years, and may have repressed them, let me describe a typical Rambo movie. There are three parts to a Rambo movie. The first part is the story. This gives purpose to the second part of the Rambo movie. This is where Rambo locks into Green Beret mode, and is obvious as to why the Rambo movies are famous. This is where he stalks, sets traps, disables his opponents, survives the wilderness, blows stuff up, and from number 2 on, kills a lot of people. The last part is of course the end, which wraps up each story, and gives you a satisfied feeling in the end. The only exception to this rule was in Rambo 2, where Frankie Stallone sang “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” It was pretty good up until that point.

I think the reason why the first three Rambo’s have worked so far, is because the first part was really well done. It was short, sweet, and set the mood just right for the rest of the film. Walking into this, I had high expectations of this film, especially considering I really enjoyed Rocky 6, which was a much better ending to the Rocky flicks than Rocky 5.

Rambo 4 is kind of Rambo 3, in more of a Rambo 2 setting. The story largely takes place in Burma. A lot of the story part of the movie tries to portray the slaughter that regularly goes on there. This is what really differs it from the other Rambo’s. Rambo 3 kind of touched on it in respects to Afghanistan during its war with Russia, but that was nothing like this. I think Stallone tried documenting some of what is going on in Burma right now. Some of the most disturbing stuff was to allow you to relate to what was going to happen later on the film. Like the role Russian Roulette played in “The Deer Hunter,” one of the focuses of the movie is where they throw some land mines in small pools of water, and make a handful of people run through it, and make them try to escape, I guess. One of the first scenes of the movie is you see someone blowing up as they stepped on a mine, and then the rest of them get shot as they stand around screaming after that.

Obviously those parts resonated with me so much, that it completely overshadowed the Rambo part of the story. When Sly was starting to write this Rambo, he was looking for something like this that was being so overlooked by much of the media in the global community.

The Rambo story line is a group of missionaries hire Rambo to bring them into Burma so they can help out a small village. This General then attacks this village, and captures a few of them whom happened to survive. The minister from the church that these people where with met up with Rambo, and asked him to take a group of mercenaries to get them. Then after a boat ride, the fun begins.

The action in the movie once they get to it is great. Once Rambo killed his first guy with his bow, it is perfect Rambo from there on out as far as I’m concerned. I was really happy with the ending as well, which I refuse to reiterate upon so I don’t spoil it.

All-in all, I liked it. It took a while to warm up to because of the scenes about what was going on in Burma, but by the time the missionaries got on the boat with Rambo, I felt right at home with the other Rambo flicks. Maybe it will be better the second time I see it as the shock kind of wears off on me from the beginning. Otherwise, when I own it on DVD, I’ll be starting it at the boat.

In spirit of how Dave would be frowned upon for giving half lemons in a review, for now, I’ll give it 3 exploding arrows out of 5.