When First Blood released in 1982 it was a huge hit and it sparked off two sequels in the next 6 years. The second part was forgettable with an improbable gun totting, pencil thin heroine and part 3 was pure torture. In retrospect its even ludicrous considering that Rambo liberates Afghan Mujaheddin freedom fighters from the clutches of the evil Soviets.
Twenty years after the last sequel comes part 4. Stallone must have been hoping to rejuvenate his waning career. Or may be he is trying to make a lasting impression, his final contribution to cinema. Let's hope its the latter. The first few minutes were the usual. Rambo is leading a retired life in Thailand where he catches cobras for a living. He also drives a boat. The unwilling hero is urged to help a charity mission and after much pleading he reluctantly agrees. I think that pleading scene is the only one in the movie in which a dialogue lasted more than two sentences. The whole time I kept reminiscing the wonderful Hot Shots: Part Deux, which is an excellent spoof of the Rambo movies.
The charity team is caught by the evil Burmese army, they were stupid enough to walk into a war zone so obviously they got caught. If there was a message in the movie it would be: live for nothing or kill everything. Like Rambo tells the terrified missionary lady you cannot change what is. Now its up to Rambo to rescue them. He does that by killing what seems to be the entire Burmese army. There were supposed to be only 100 hundred soldiers in the camp but there were definitely many times that number of dead bodies.
You might ask how this makes it a bad movie. Each killing scene is shot so realistically that after the first few you either go numb or run out of the movie hall or puke. Realistic gore is sometimes required to impress upon the audience the gravity of the scene like in the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. But when the whole movie is about showing the different ways in which people can be killed, about how blood and entrails can scatter and about how big guns can rip off heads and arms and cut bodies into pieces, it becomes deplorable. In fact violence is a lead character in the movie and it is pictured so well and with such commendable depth that by the end you are accustomed to it and accept it.
There were many people who told me that the movie was good because it was very realistic. Realistic? Really?? In which reality will any one person see hundreds of bodies torn apart in the span of an hour. There are so many shots after shots of shocking, intolerable violence that it grabs your attention and by the end of the ordeal you appreciate the movie forgetting the reason you found it interesting is very base. All the creativity that went into making of this gorefest was intended to shock the audience with socially unacceptable imagery and that makes it similar to porn.
That said there are many other movies with similar or even more morbid violence. The newly released Doomsday has a few scenes that challenge our tolerance limits. The cannibalistic punks of future roast a soldier alive before they cut him to pieces and eat him. But the plot of that tasteless movie is itself asinine and beyond reproach.
Twenty years after the last sequel comes part 4. Stallone must have been hoping to rejuvenate his waning career. Or may be he is trying to make a lasting impression, his final contribution to cinema. Let's hope its the latter. The first few minutes were the usual. Rambo is leading a retired life in Thailand where he catches cobras for a living. He also drives a boat. The unwilling hero is urged to help a charity mission and after much pleading he reluctantly agrees. I think that pleading scene is the only one in the movie in which a dialogue lasted more than two sentences. The whole time I kept reminiscing the wonderful Hot Shots: Part Deux, which is an excellent spoof of the Rambo movies.
The charity team is caught by the evil Burmese army, they were stupid enough to walk into a war zone so obviously they got caught. If there was a message in the movie it would be: live for nothing or kill everything. Like Rambo tells the terrified missionary lady you cannot change what is. Now its up to Rambo to rescue them. He does that by killing what seems to be the entire Burmese army. There were supposed to be only 100 hundred soldiers in the camp but there were definitely many times that number of dead bodies.
You might ask how this makes it a bad movie. Each killing scene is shot so realistically that after the first few you either go numb or run out of the movie hall or puke. Realistic gore is sometimes required to impress upon the audience the gravity of the scene like in the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. But when the whole movie is about showing the different ways in which people can be killed, about how blood and entrails can scatter and about how big guns can rip off heads and arms and cut bodies into pieces, it becomes deplorable. In fact violence is a lead character in the movie and it is pictured so well and with such commendable depth that by the end you are accustomed to it and accept it.
There were many people who told me that the movie was good because it was very realistic. Realistic? Really?? In which reality will any one person see hundreds of bodies torn apart in the span of an hour. There are so many shots after shots of shocking, intolerable violence that it grabs your attention and by the end of the ordeal you appreciate the movie forgetting the reason you found it interesting is very base. All the creativity that went into making of this gorefest was intended to shock the audience with socially unacceptable imagery and that makes it similar to porn.
That said there are many other movies with similar or even more morbid violence. The newly released Doomsday has a few scenes that challenge our tolerance limits. The cannibalistic punks of future roast a soldier alive before they cut him to pieces and eat him. But the plot of that tasteless movie is itself asinine and beyond reproach.
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