Review – Rambo

This likely-last installment in the Rambo franchise has two things going for it that previous efforts – and most big-budget action movies in general – don’t: it’s excessively gory and extremely brief. Our hero is once again dragged out of retirement, first to ferry a band of missionaries into Myanmar and then to lead a squad of mercenaries on a rescue mission after the first set of folks run afoul of corrupt, cruel government troops. Along the way we’re forced to sit through a lot of sexual violence – threatened and depicted – against the female members of the cast. But in partial compensation, once the large-caliber sniper rifles and machine guns get whipped out, we get a ton of decapitations, giant gaping holes and at least one hapless baddie sawed completely in half. I presume this almost grand guignol approach is an effort to keep up with what target audiences have gotten used to in ultra-violent video games. Likewise, the running time appears engineered for people with short attention spans. Little time is wasted on plot or character development, and the result is so short that the end credits take up more than 10 percent of the total running time. As a bloody massacre that doesn’t pretend to be anything else, it does an adequate job. Mildly amusing