Shark-Bite Movie Review: Rambo -- Expat Executioner's Song

Vietnam vet John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is an impressive specimen of the Thailand expat species. He speaks the language fluently, is comfortable outside of a serviced condominium – indeed he’s on more intimate terms with Thailand’s backwoods than a forest monk – and one would assume, given his demeanor, that he’s utterly unconcerned about visa runs. And he might have had to make a couple; after all he’s been here 20 years, or so we can assume from the continuum established in the earlier films.

“Rambo III”, you’ll remember, began with our bandana-wearing friend dividing his time between restoring a temple and bashing people with sticks for a fistful of 100 baht notes in Bangkok pit fights. Still, this was Rambo’s “Phra Farang” (Western monk) period: his stick-fighting money went strictly to temple upkeep. Rambo, like many farang temple dwellers, was on a journey of self-discovery and he eventually found out that restoring Buddha statues to their initial glory was just not in his genetic makeup – staging one-man wars is though and he did that teaming up with err… the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

And now, in “John Rambo” (“Rambo” in the US), we find our hero once again in Thailand and he has still yet to answer the call “Rambo, to thine one self be true.” Rather than indulging himself in the work he loves and is obviously incredibly skilled at – the wholesale slaughter of baddies – he instead has a job that may not even be included on the list of jobs forbidden for foreigners simply because it would not have occurred to a Thai bureaucrat that a foreigner would ever want the gig: poisonous snake-catching in Northern Thailand. How exactly did Rambo get here and what has he been up to in the intervening 20 years? What did Rambo think of the coup and who did he vote for on Academy Fantasia? Perhaps the next movie could focus on Rambo’s life as an expat: Som Tam Rambo: He came for the killing, he stays for the spices.

But, of course, Thailand is just a jumping off point in this film. The focus of this one is Burma, specifically the plight of the Karen ethnic minority there. Rambo is approached by a group of Christian missionaries looking to get into a Karen village and they’ve heard that Rambo knows the Salween better than anyone.

The plot could be drawn along a straight line with various mushroom clouds interspersed along it to represent points of great carnage: Rambo takes the missionaries to Burma, they get kidnapped and imprisoned, a priest requests that he and a group of soldiers of fortune go in and rescue them and they – outnumbered by scores of Burmese soldiers – do just that with the parts of more than one Burmese soldier landing in a separate postal district along the way. The mercenaries could seemingly have been picked out of any low-rent backpacker district in Thailand; one of them throws an empty Beer Chang into the Salween River during the boat trip, while a hard-arsed Brit oddly curses a stick-wielding Burmese major by saying “Come on and have a go at me you ladyboy cunt!”

The violence in this one is something you won’t see outside of gorefest video games. This is the most violent film I can recall and is said to have a kill count of 236, a Rambo record (the Rambo character only had 59 confirmed kills throughout his entire tour in Vietnam, so he’s really made the most of civilian/mercenary life) and that the film averages 2.59 killings per minute. There are guts galore in this one and more than one case of an exploding person to contend with – indeed this would be a truly horrific thing to see in 3D with the various body parts shooting every which way at top speed.

Stallone says the violence was meant to underscore the genuine horror of what’s going on in Burma. As a recent Asia Times article points out, those on the ground say that as vicious as the Burmese Army is in Karen areas and as horrible as the crimes they committed are, the scale of what’s taking place in Rambo could only come out of the movies. Rapes of Karen villagers by Burmese soldiers are common, but cases crop up in ones and twos – the hellish red-smoke-filled rape orgy that punctuates the film’s early rescue scene is a fiction, they say.

That observation is fair enough, but the fact that international Burmese activist groups have lauded this movie and actual Karen soldiers have reportedly been making its catchphrase “Live for nothing, die for something” their own should be enough to spare Stallone from critiques who say he’s exploiting the Karen situation for his own wallet. A more realistic account of the Karen situation couldn’t be done under the Rambo franchise: villagers being forced to starve in mountains by army officials just does not lend itself to the video-game blast-em-up cathartic action that is the reason people go to see Rambo movies.

This is the most entertaining and best directed of the Rambo films since First Blood, and if, along with this, a fraction of this film’s enormous international audience went online and researched a little more into the truth of the Karen situation in Burma, then Sly’s revisit of the Rambo franchise was doubly worth it.

Noel, Bangkok