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Operation explicit manhood

Stallone is back with Rocky's bookend
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 27th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
This grunt's for hire. The latest beef recall Stateside missed Stallone.
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John Rambo

Directed by Sylvester Stallone
With Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze and Ken Howard

I worked my way through college serving faux-buttered popcorn and gallons of Tab at a dying cinema in Seattle. The Movie House, in the city’s Greenwood district, was once a local art cinema that specialized in double-bills of Bergman and Altman. But, when the owners decided to sell it, they began running it into the ground with dubious second-run programs.
It was into the second week of hosting Rambo: First Blood II that my manager decided to seek revenge, both on Sylvester Stallone’s film and on his predominately drunk and impotently angry male audience. He decided that the best way to combat war porn was with gay porn, of which he was an avid collector. And so one night I joined him in the projection room, where we artfully spliced single frames of long-forgotten flesh epics into the fourth reel of Rambo; subliminal “action” shots in the middle of Stallone’s action scenes (I would like to think the titles of these films were The Grooms of Dragula or On Golden Blond).
Whether these single flashes of body parts within Rambo’s rapid-edited blood orgy registered among the rooting loge warriors is unknown. The pleasure was ours in knowing that we were subverting the whole grotesque experience. Foolishly (as it was obviously illegal), we decided to leave intact some of our 35mm-meddling when the film cans were returned to the distributor.
Time has passed, though not for Stallone’s iconic parody of masculinity, John Rambo. As with that other beef-witted creation of his, Rocky Balboa, Stallone now seems damned to impersonating these Reagan-era action figures until the crack of doom. The ravages of age might have reduced his pecs to unbuttressed paps (we are spared the unexamined eroticism of his shirtless rampages), but our post-traumatic stress hero is still up for a fight in his latest “warno,” John Rambo.
When we last saw the mighty Rambo, he was making the world safe for jihad by backing Afghanistan’s Mujahadin in Rambo III (how soon we forget our friends). Now, our Vietnam vet avenger is passing his days capturing snakes for some roadside attractions in Thailand.
Into his jungle lair stumbles an earnest band of Baptists, hoping to make their way upriver to bring comfort and tracts to one of Burma’s minority groups. Rambo brushes them off, telling them that the only thing any downtrodden peasant in Burma needs is weapons, and he’s not interested in sailing them into the neighboring war zone. But one sympathetic missionary, Sarah (Julie Benz), appeals to Rambo’s better nature, and soon they are all off into the Asian hellscape.
One thing leads to another, and soon these fishers of men are being used for hog fodder. Rambo, with a small unit of beefcake mercenaries, will have to defeat the Burmese Army to save them.
What follows makes Hostel look like Bedknobs and Broomsticks. On the cinematic scale of human slaughter (blown-apart legs, gurgling head wounds, intestinal spillage), John Rambo must come dangerously close to capturing the red ribbon. Every viscus scrap is lovingly chronicled from the exiting of its host body to the receiving walls and surrounding ground. The final battle tableau resembles one of The Killing Field’s scenes from nearby Cambodia, though more upbeat.
Stallone, muscles glistening like Tussauds wax, manages to grunt effortlessly. The Baptists are played with all the suburban intensity required, and are even given a Friendly Persuasion conundrum as to whether they should forsake their touted Christian nonviolence for something more manly. Their choice will hardly come as a surprise.
The lessons on offer in this bilge are apparent enough, though it is instructive to compare this flick to the fine No Country for Old Men. Both are saturated in the violence of the Vietnam War, and both start from the premise that that despicable act unleashed something unsettling into the world.
The Coens’ film deals with this theme with sorrowful gravity. Stallone, the far more artistically limited director, can only allow himself flashes of remorse in a cheesy dream sequence (a plagiarism from his own latest Rocky programmer) before going back out and rolling in the madness like a dog in a butcher’s slough.
War, apparently, is a matter of honor. And John Rambo is porn for the “Staying the Course” crowd.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (27/02/2008):

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