Oh, Sly, you made it so easy to mock.  Your attempt at aging gracefully and moving into more "serious" and "character driven" parts having failed miserably - really, who remembers Copland? - and your last gasp attempts at staying at the top of the action heap having failed even worse - I'll resume having nightmares if I even try to recall the last one of these I saw - you simply faded into obscurity.  So when you announced that you were bringing your two most iconic characters back out of mothballs at a time when you were far too old to play either of them believably the jokes started rolling.  Clearly this was the case of an aging celebrity who simply didn't know when to let go.

Well, we were wrong.  All of us.  Rocky Balboa actually succeeded in the apparently impossible task of restoring respectability to the franchise and, dammit, with the new Rambo film you've gone and made a pure eighties style action picture with all the added benefits of our increased tolerance for on screen blood and superior special effects.  Guess in the middle of all the aging meat head jokes we kind of forgot that there's a brain in there too, and one that won an Oscar for writing Rocky no less ...

Don't get me wrong, here. Rambo is no Rocky.  Plot is minimal and not only only is there no character development but you know exactly who every one of these people is and what they're going to do from the moment they step on to the screen.  Plus you could make a legitimate argument that it's borderline misogynist with Dexter's Julie Benz given nothing at all to do but look pretty enough to inspire our hero (at the beginning) then gasp and cower at the carnage all around her while waiting to be saved (at the end).  But with both this film and with Rocky Balboa to not only acknowledge what all the jokesters were saying - that he's not a young man by any means any more - and actually incorporate it into the stories, making both films about his own failure to get on with things as much as they are about anything else.

Which makes this probably a good point to talk about what this movie is supposedly about.  John Rambo, aging mercenary gone slightly to seed - Stallone keeps the shirt on throughout, and for good reason - is living a nondescript life running a river barge in the remote parts of Thailand when approached by a group of Christian missionaries who want him to transport them and a load of medical supplies over the Burmese border to help the targets of Burmese genocide.  But Rambo's no fool.  Genocide happens because bad men with lots of big guns want it to happen and when you go messing with bad men with big guns you get shot.  So he glowers.  And says no.  And glowers some more.  But then the pretty blonde woman comes and asks him real nice, like.  Rambo is smitten and so he glowers some more and then says yes. 

Everybody gets into the boat and heads up river where Rambo demonstrates his manliness by single handedly killing the entire crew of a Burmese gunship with a hankering for a bit of white-lady rape, thereby preserving pretty white lady's virtue while simultaneously ruining his own chances with her. Boat gets up river, missionaries go to remote village, Rambo goes home. Village gets attacked, silly Americans get taken hostage - and fed to pigs! - while locals slaughtered. Minister from home comes and hires mercenaries, Rambo takes them up river where he inspires them to do one good and selfless act - both of which mercenaries are widely known for - and they slaughter more than a hundred Burmese soldiers to save the two surviving Yanks while abandoning the captured local women to be gang raped. Yay America!

So that's what it's supposed to be about.  What it's really about is the blood and this thing's got it in spades.  The action starts early - these are the benefits of totally ignoring character development - and is absolutely unrelenting.  Rambo earns its harsh rating the good old fashioned way:  dismemberments, decapitations, sprays of blood and body parts and high caliber weaponry punching fist sized holes through flesh.  This is a violent movie.  A very, very violent movie.  Once it hits DVD I will certainly do my very best to tally up an accurate body count but for now all I can say is:  lots.  It's surprisingly well shot violence, too, Stallone proving to be a decent hand as director as well - he also co-wrote the script - and opting to shoot the violence in a detailed but straightforward, matter of fact manner that makes it feel far less exploitative than it really is.

So there you have it. First Blood is still the only one of these films to make any serious attempt at legitimate character work and is still the best of the lot but Rambo throws enough current politics in to at least be topical and delivers audiences plenty of what they want without ever descending at all into the cheese factor that killed the eighties beefcake film in the first place. Not only does Stallone not embarrass himself, he's gone and turned in the best Rambo flick by far since the very first one.  So, Sly, I'm sorry for doubting.

One final note:  that horrible metal music that plagues the trailer?  Mercifully not in the movie.  At all.  Maybe ol' Rambo should go slap the marketers ...