Rambo

"Rambo" ain't got time for character development.

Well, I guess it does, if you count an evangelical Western doctor realizing that, sometimes, you've just gotta bash a man's head in with a rock. Or Rambo getting in touch with his inner ... Rambo. But other than that, this movie's all about the viscera, man.

Here's the deal: John Rambo's a snake wrangler in upcountry Thailand (I'm gonna guess somewhere near Chiang Mai, where one of my sisters-in-law lives. She tells me it's quite nice. They have a Dairy Queen, a Home Depot, and a muy thai boxing instructor I think she has a crush on. But that's neither here nor there.). He lives rather a solitary life; just him, his two employees, and his steroid connection. When a group of medical missionaries asks him to take them upriver to savage Burma, he tells them to blow: they can't handle the horror, the horror. But when one of the missionaries, Fay Wr- no, Naomi Ca- no, Julie Benz tries to talk him into it, can beauty get through to the simple beast Rambo has become? Well, when the power of pheremones compels you, there's not much you can do. Soon, Rambo's taking the group upriver, slaying some pirates, and sending the missionaries on their way.

Rambo thinks nothing of it when he never hears from them again, but then The White Shadow himself, Ken Howard, shows up on his makeshift doorstep to tell him that the missionaries have (predictably) disappeared. This leaves Rambo with a tough decision: does he keep to himself and let the world go by, or does he forge himself up a new combat knife and get involved? Well, I'm here to tell you, when The White Shadow tells you to drive to the hoop, you drive to the f*in' hoop. And thus, John Rambo chooses to embrace his destiny as a killing machine and find comradeship with other killing machines.

That's, like, the first twenty minutes. The rest is carnage. So much carnage, such a ridiculously enormously unbelievable amount of carnage, that I laughed out loud at Stallone's wilingness to go so far over the top that I half-expected him to kill the big villain through ultimate arm wrestling. Is it entertaining? If you like to watch things go "Boom!" Is it engaging? If you want to lay odds on the number of barrels of Kensington Gore used in its making. Can it be the centerpiece of an evening with the guys, a couple of pizzas, and a case of Bud? You betcha.

So, yeah, I'd see it again. Under the proper circumstances.