“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
I’ll never have McCarthy’s eloquence, but it always just feels to be the right quote to apply when trying to understand violence that people bring on each other, either in fiction or the more tragic application to real life. Now I’m not some peacenik. I enjoy plenty of films that are graphic and disturbing; dripping with blood, grue, and viscera, all meted out in a wonton fashion for sake of entertainment, the likes of which would make my dear mother shudder and pray for me, hoping I was not some sort of lost soul. Honestly, I would watch somebody lower a nun into a woodchipper if I felt it fit with the plot of a story and that it was (in context of said story) sensible. Seriously, make it happen- Nun. Woodchipper. There can only be one winner…and the smart money is on the machine.
I’m not a prude, I would argue I have a strong stomach…but I am aquatinted with those who possess constitutions that make mine look like it belongs to a crying sissy who also happens to be a little girl. “Why should any of this matter Chris?” Well, I had the opportunity to screen Rambo: Last Blood over the weekend and I was somewhat shocked at my own reaction to the film. I have enjoyed the series for years: I recall getting in trouble for purchasing an old dog-eared paperback of David Morell’s 1972 Novel First Blood when I was 12 from my father…but I had already read the majority of it- so aside from disapproval, I was able to finish the tragic story of John Rambo- a decorated Vietnam soldier and former prisoner of war who returns home to a country that is at best indifferent to him, and worst accuses him of war crimes.
As a character study, Morrel’s Rambo is marvelous: he is truly a man without a country. John Rambo was a trained Army Ranger that was part of an elite special forces team, code named “Baker” tasked with behind enemy lines reconnaissance. His entire unit was captured and tortured by the Viet Cong, and after months of imprisonment, he escapes and rejoins the fight. After the war ends, the Conservative establishment wants nothing to do with him, he is a dull razorblade- useful, but now we have shaved and it’s time to toss him away. Liberal society doesn’t want him either, he is a barbaric killing machine- he has no place in a society trying to go back to “peace”- foolishly thinking there technically was a time for it. Drifting across country on a search for remaining friends- he is arrested for “vagrancy” and “resisting arrest.” He finally snaps, his PTSD fully kicking in, he escapes the custody of the Sherriff’s department who is holding him, and unintentionally kills a man in the process. And thus…he reverts to the thing he was good at…fighting and killing…but now it’s his own countrymen. The novel ends with Rambo mortally wounding the Sheriff who initially harassed him and then being unexpectedly happy to die himself, removed from existence by a shotgun blast wielded by the very man who trained him to kill in the first place, Col. Trautman. A tragedy played out with action, that has a solid beginning, middle and end.
So now of course, you have got to make this into a film. 1982: Enter Director Ted Kotcheff, who immediately thought of the role for Stallone to play…and Stallone’s own clout from the Rocky films allowed him to rewrite the script and adapt the character to be more psychologically wounded and sympathetic- basically down playing the “snap” as just a survival mechanism…and not having him go full on psycho. Hence…Rambo survives the confrontation at the end…agreeing to leave with Col. Trautman. The film ends with Rambo in handcuffs…but being treated for the first time with some dignity by his fellow soldiers, leaving his fate ambiguous.
But it’s Hollywood…and why not take a character like John Rambo out for a walk to make some big explosions and earn the studio some money? So, we get 1985’s imaginatively titled Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rambo has been imprisoned for a few years and his old buddy Trautman come around offering a pardon and a chance to help- they need reconnaissance on the Vietnamese prison Rambo escaped to see if there are still American POW’s left behind. So, we get an excuse to see what Rambo does best, fighting the Vietnamese and their Soviet allies in the jungle, saving some POW’s and sticking it to the U.S. Government for not caring enough about soldiers who give their all. Fully pardoned he walks off and builds a monastic life in Thailand for himself.
But we can’t leave this alone- it’s a franchise! So, by 1988 we see Stallone saddle back up again for Rambo III. This time it means teaming up with Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan- joining in to support the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation (look, it was the 80’s…” the enemy of my enemy is my friend” was the reptilian logic of the day; and James Bond did the same thing the year prior). More fighting, more horseback riding, bonding with locals, saving his mentor and stopping “evil” by way of brutal force. His mission complete, Rambo heads back to Thailand for a quiet existence and quite honestly that’s the last any of us thought about the subject.
Two decades went by. The world got smaller. Communism under the USSR fell…creating larger ripples of strife, fighting and new national identities, while at the same time exposing ethno-cultural conflicts that had been kept in check by authoritarian control. The United States became a mono-power and rode out the 90’s in relative prosperity. This would be shattered by an act of terrorism at the dawn of the new millennium, one that created shockwaves that would be felt worldwide, leading to a bellicose response from an unchecked United States of America. Two wars ensued…one of which still continues as of this posting…stretching conflict on for over 17 years. So much change. So much turmoil…and for Sylvester Stallone it seemed like the perfect time to bring the character of John Rambo back.
But 2008 saw Rambo as a dark and brooding rumination on one’s place in the world…with John Rambo still eking out an existence in Thailand, jaded and dismissive of western missionaries coming to him, asking for assistance to cross into Burma to give aid to the Karen people. He is convinced to help, but when Rambo kills pirates threatening the group, they view him as the monster and leave his protection. Later, those same Missionaries are captured, and Rambo is again tasked with assisting mercenaries to go in and rescue those very people. Somewhere in all this jumbled mess, the character has a conversation with himself that boils down to accepting his own self-loathing; he kills because he was trained to do it, he is good at it, and most importantly…he has learned to like it.
And with that switch being thrown, John Rambo crafts a new wicked looking machete, picks up his bow and arrows and takes on an entire division of the Burmese army… turning a good number of them into a fine pink mist with the help of a M2 Browning Machine gun. I wish I was being hyperbolic with that statement…but the violence level in the fourth film has taken on cartoonish proportions and makes the previous entries feel very chaste and conservative in their depictions of what John Rambo is capable of. If the count is to be believed, Rambo kills 254 people onscreen during the 91 mins of runtime. To be perfectly honest, I immensely enjoyed it- I saw it as a film that finally kind of embraced the crazy- something I felt the first two sequels handled rather poorly- and ran with it in a way that felt it was winking at the camera.
And then…this film happened. In the 11 years separating the films, John Rambo and most importantly, Sylvester Stallone, seems to have had a bit of a character change. Gone is the winking- there is no fun to be had here. This is a “serious film.” Good old Rambo has been living back home on the family horse ranch in Arizona, adopting a makeshift family – acting as a dedicated surrogate Uncle to a young girl and helping her Grandmother raise her since the death of her own mother. So…this is going to be an awkward sentence to properly write: this version of Rambo seems inherently racist- and I will explain my logic here. His adopted family is clearly 2nd & 3rd generation from initial Mexican immigrants- so citizenship non-withstanding- the logic follows thusly- Rambo doesn’t hate any one group of people. It’s more of…as comedian Ken Reid so eloquently puts it…more of an “artisanal racism”- the logic that “I don’t dislike you because you don’t look like me, I dislike you because you don’t live in my house.” Everyone is an outside threat to his world…and will be dealt with through violence. Knowing that, we must in a very ham-fisted way get his beloved niece down to Mexico- she wants to speak to her biological father…and of course while there, a former High School friend of hers drugs her and sells her into sexual slavery to a local cartel.
No calling the authorities, no asking for help. Rambo grabs a knife and a gun and drives to Mexico to “sort this out” and bring his niece home. The villains are a pair of brothers who run girls and drugs over the border, portrayed as being cartoonishly evil. Rambo fails to get to his niece as first, receiving a near death beating at the hands of some 40 odd men- and then to show just how “bad they are” the make it a point to single out his niece, have her tortured and then forcibly made a heroin addict, because Rambo came looking for her.[1] He is found by a journalist who tends to his wounds and explains to him that this cartel has been in operation for a long time and that they took her sister several years ago. Although she saved his life, Rambo is rather mean to her- complaining that she isn’t helping him enough to get his niece back. Regardless, in a very bloody fashion, Rambo storms a brothel and kills everybody he encounters, cartel members or not, until he gets his niece back…who of course must die en route home to make Rambo even more crazed.
What we get next is 40 minutes of action without joy, violence swapped in to cover for lack of plot. It’s just a single white man, killing a lot of other brown men without any semblance of compunction. Rambo turns his family farm into a deadly adult version of “Home Alone”- loading it with spider tunnels, dead drops, punji traps, hidden guns, and explosives- setting up his plans to kill as many people as he can. He then arms himself, goes back over the border and gruesomely decapitates one of the brothers, leaving a calling card so that the remaining brother will take the bait and follow old John back to his death farm. Of course, the Cartel under the remaining brother takes a force of 40 odd men over the border and show up…allowing Rambo to kill them all in unique and horrible ways.
Rambo is wounded a few times during the who sequence, but he does manage to save the brother for last…pinning him to the wall of the barn by way of four well placed arrows and then taking the large hunting knife he is so known for, removes the mans heart and shows it to him as he dies. Bloodied, exhausted, Rambo sits bleeding on a porch rocking chair and monologs that he will keep the memories of his family alive, he will continue to “fight” …generically against forgetting and just “in general.” A better film would have nihilistically let Rambo die here- closing the loop and at least giving the audience and himself a small measure of comfort that is his own way (killing 48 odd men) he has righted a wrong.
But no. Undoubtably, we have not seen the last of John Rambo, because it’s never going to be over for him. As Stallone has set things up, to poorly paraphrase McCarthy- Rambo’s violence begets more violence, and then justifies that violence for sake of winning the fight he started. With how his character has evolved over the decades, with how much money this film took in- I have no doubts he shall return. In a sense, Stallone has presented his own twisted recreation of Alan Ladd’s Shane, having John Rambo riding off into the sunset with a bullet in his side; yet in this instance there is a glaring difference: there is nobody desperately calling for him to come back- they are all dead.
[1] Now to be fair- this is an old motif and it can be/and has been done masterfully in other B-Movies/Drive in films. 1973’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture (retitled from They Call Her One Eye) is about a woman who is kidnapped and has this whole same plot occur to her…yet it’s about her struggle to free herself and get revenge. It too has “evil villains” but they operate as bad people…who still behave like people.