Take the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Add Sylvester Stallone. Get rid of any trace of conscience or moral import. Stretch it out to just over an hour. What you are left with is Rambo. What you are left with is totally fucking awesome.

To say this film is violent is like saying AC/DC play rock music, or that Evel Knievel rode motorcycles, or that Genghis Khan invaded countries: at once glaringly obvious and completely inadequate. Rambo celebrates violence, wallows in it, gorges itself on it before puking it up and eating it again. Violence is to Rambo what suspense is to Psycho, or romance is to Casablanca, or daft comedy is to The Naked Gun. It is so violent that it redefines and re-contextualises cinematic violence - and your expectations and tolerance of it - right before your eyes as you watch. It is very, very violent.
 
People do not just get killed in Rambo. They get pulverised, gored, blown to bits. Limbs fly through the air at high speeds, guts paste every available square inch, landmines scatter innards in every direction. And it's not just the soldiers who get it: mothers, fathers, babies and Christians all get stabbed, raped, burned, eaten by pigs and blasted to red mush. Rambo prevents one chap from raping a woman by ripping his throat out with his bare hands. The woman is horrified but somewhat grateful.
 
In a world where kids blow baddies' heads off their shoulders in first-person-shooter video games daily, Stallone has upped the ante and delivered an action film that means business, the way action films sometimes do. And he has done it by explicitly dumping the frilly, post-modern baggage of the latter day action hero: John Rambo is a killing machine, plain and simple - and he sort of likes it. There is no clutter from romantic subplots, character complexities or exploration of moral grey areas.

Characters are flimsy to the point of irrelevance; they are either there to kill or be killed, nothing more and nothing less. (We know the Burmese general is a baddie because he wears sunglasses, smokes, and has young boys delivered to his room at night. What more do you want - a name?) The irony with this, of course, is that through the blood and brains and fire and noise, this film rings strangely true in its depiction of war. It's the very lack of character development, while seeming one-dimensional during the film, that leaves you with an aftertaste of realism. On some horrific level, isn't that what war is, after all? Just lots of faceless, nameless people murdering each other?

The message - as much as there is one - is simple, and clear: sometimes violence is needed. You can have all the good will in the world, sign peace treaties and read from the bible to confused paraplegic foreign children, but every so often you just need to cut some evil bastard's head off with a homemade machete.  With Rambo, Stallone has not exactly re-invented one of his defining personae as much as re-evaluated him and dusted off the crap that obscured the character's purpose in the poor Rambo III, bringing him back into sharp, single-minded focus and relevancy. Although fantastical, Rambo is the first of the sequels to really remind the viewer of the damaged loner from First Blood: a cartoon, maybe, but a pathetic, human one. Through John Rambo, the movie accepts war as a fact of life. It's unavoidable; might as well be good at it.

Let's get it straight: Rambo is an action film, offering unparalleled thrills of the blood-and-thunder variety. For some people, that's where it will end, and many will find it distasteful. If you look through the gunsmoke and entrails, however, you might find that with this delirious, deranged parade of exploding children, flying limbs and smashed heads Sylvester Stallone may just have accidentally-on-purpose made one of the most honest filmed accounts of a big part of the American psyche we've seen in recent times. (Adam Hell)

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