Rocky Balboa tripped clumsily but engagingly over the line between self-deprecation and egomania: it was an enjoyably hubristic gesture that suggested that its creator had at least a vestigial sense of humor. Rambo, which resurrects Sylvester Stallone’s other frequently shirtless screen alter ego, is a straight-faced debacle — starting with its opening salvo of real-life footage of casualties of the Burmese-Karen conflict.

One could argue that Stallone is trying to alert mainstream audiences to the horrors of the world’s longest-running civil war; in that case, one would be a tool. The grisly details are just window dressing for a straightforward back-in-the-saddle narrative, which opens with John Rambo humbly wrangling cobras somewhere on the Myanmar border. For the sake of others, he’s keeping to himself (he’s not much of a conversationalist anyway), until a group of naïve Christian missionaries arrive and ask if he’ll ferry them to a rebel outpost in need of medical supplies. Reluctant to lead them to certain doom, Rambo demurs — muttering something about the impossibility of change — but the comeliest of the group (Julie Benz) appeals to what’s left of his better nature. A few scenes later, the missionaries are MIA and Rambo, having suffered through flashback visions of the previous films, concludes that killing is what he’s good at, and starts sharpening his machete.

By choosing the Burmese genocide as a backdrop — and by depicting the Burmese military as not only murderers but also ugly, stunted simpletons, sadists and (of course) pedophiles — Stallone is essentially writing his character (and the audience) the moral equivalent of a blank check: under these brutal circumstances, no act of retribution could be too severe. And severe is not a strong enough word for the level of bloodletting here, all of it cruelly detailed (there have been significant advances in the field of depicting disembowelment since 1985). Everything else feels old-school, though, and not in a good way. However tempting it might be to laugh the film off as I-Love-the-'80s excess — and Stallone, who may not be smart but sure is canny, is counting on the post-irony crowd to juice the box office gross — the fact is that Rambo is simply reprehensible.

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