First, John Rambo restored America’s faith in its ability to kick Third World ass. Then, he and his mujahedeen comrades drove the Soviet infidels out of Afghanistan, ushering in the era of death sentences for kite-flying and Osama Bin Laden summer camps. So it only seems fitting that he’s back again, 20 years later, to blow up the blowback, blast a few contemporary box-office insurgents into oblivion while he’s at it, and perhaps most impressively, illustrate the positive impact a life of brutal paramilitary violence and primitive jungle living can have on one’s hair. At 61, Rambo’s pelt is as thick and glossy and black as a Singapore ladyboy’s.
Still, if the lush, hothouse climate of Thailand has kept Rambo in that country when, by all rights, he should be subjecting his locks to the dry, embrittling winds of Baghdad, no matter. These days, if you make a war movie it doesn’t really matter where you set it. Rambo may take place in the Far East, but its storyline of Western do-gooders and mercenaries who venture into inhospitable territory to help indigenous brown people struggle for freedom against monstrous government oppressors ports easily to Iraq. Especially as things spiral from the merely chaotic—“Hey, are those pirates about to attack our boat?”—to the unimaginably horrific—“Oh, crap, evil pigs are eating my intestines as I watch!”—and the mercenaries begin to debate if they should stay the course or cut and run. (The do-gooders, being tied-up at that point, have no choice in the matter.)
In 2007, Hollywood hit us with a surge of movies about Iraq—Lions for Lambs, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah —but even top guns like Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Redford, Jake Gyllehaal and Reese Witherspoon could not pierce the heavy armor of our indifference. In less than two weeks, however, Rambo has earned $30 million at the box office, more than those three other movies combined.
It’s a truism that people go to the movies for escapist reasons. Why pay nine bucks to watch Robert Redford tell us about the bad news from Iraq when we’re already sick of watching Brian Williams and Anderson Cooper tell us the same stuff for free? But if we’ve been shunning Iraq movies because they remind us too vividly of the costs of our blitzkrieg humanitarianism, what are we escaping from as we wallow in Sylvester Stallone’s bleak, 85-minute killfest?
Certainly, Rambo does a bang-up job of reminding us that war is a visual, visceral phenomenon. In the early days of our Iraqi adventures, when it seemed as if even Entertainment Tonight had reporters embedded with the troops, images of combat were inescapable, the stuff of prime time. Eventually, however, media coverage decreased. Our internal flak guns have gotten better at shooting down the latest Reuters dispatches as soon as they near the no-fly zones of our consciousness. The killing continues, but it seems far more distant and abstract than it once did. Now, the conflict in Iraq exists as the Scott Baio of wars: We know it’s still alive, we know it’s still on cable somewhere, but when we see it, we flip past it quickly.
Stallone, however, wants to make us stop and look. No doubt sensing that people are tired of talking about Iraq, he gives the biggest speaking role to Rambo’s machine gun. In the movie’s most heated action sequences, he speeds up the film to a fast-forward pace; it’s as if he wants to pack in as many deaths per second of viewing time as possible in case we get bored and turn our attention elsewhere. In interviews, Stallone admits he used human growth hormone to bulk up for the shoot. Apparently, he fed steroids to his ammunition, too; these bullets rip apart torsos and limbs in ways that must leave regular bullets gasping with envy.
At times, it almost seems as if the movie is being shot inside a Cuisinart. There goes a head! There goes a leg! Movie screens have not been splattered with this much viscous liquid since that Jackson Pollock biopic, and if you don’t get Stallone’s message by the fourth exploding cranium, maybe you will by the 33rd. War is bad news, yo!
Alas, that’s only half of Rambo’s message. As our 2008 presidential candidates all strain mightily to define themselves as the candidate of change, Rambo croaks his single refrain with the consistency of Poe’s raven: “You’re not changing anything.” In the Ramboverse, war is permanent, war is part of our blood, the thing that makes us human. And this, of course, is Rambo’s great escapist message, the balm that has led to its surprisingly strong box-office performance. If not Iraq, we would just be sending our soldiers somewhere else to die. So why fret about it? A sequel’s coming anyway. And the sequel will be so much like the first version, and the second version, and the third, that tacking a trailing Roman numeral on its name to distinguish it from its predecessors is really kind of pointless.