Adam Baran

I may be biased, or mentally challenged, depending on your point of view, and I may also be calling this a bit early, but I’m going to say that the Best Movie of 2008 is, and will be named later in the year, Rambo. FUCKING RAMBO!!!! He kills EVERYONE ON EARTH!!! He decapitates them with his home made machete, he shoots them with his super powered arrows, he guns them down with his mega-machine gun. Stallone is a genius and turns this flick into the equivalent of a really hardcore 70’s grindhouse roughie with way better special FX. Tarantino must be jealous! There’s even a moment at the end that recalls the final showdown in Kill Bill.

I know the reviews say this film is violent, but I just want to say it is not just violent, it is unbelievably jaw-droppingly violent, hence the grindhouse comparison. A whole village is massacred in the most unspeakable ways - children are stabbed and tossed in the paths of flamethrowers. Stallone rips through a bad guy’s carotid artery with his bare fucking hands. And don’t get me started on the scene where he sets of a mothertrucking H-BOMB!!! Who knew? I knew! I knew it all the time that it would be so good! I can’t get it out of my head way more than There Will Be Blood!

The plot is basic Rambo - Rambo’s asked to - oh wait - WHO CARES ABOUT THE PLOT! Rambo has to save a girl - cut to hundreds of nameless Burmese (yeah the country is never referred to by it’s proper name Myanmar) baddies getting the Rambo treatment. The dialogue is sparse, the cursory set-up scenes will often be reduced to their bare fucking minimum.

Girl: I don’t know what to say

Rambo: Then don’t say anything. Go Home. Just go home.

Stallone knows there doesn’t need to be any fat in this script. It’s a perfect piece of art. Stallone is a man’s man with so many veins in his bulging arms and thighs that at times he resembles one of those trees that throws apples at Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Seriously, I mean I don’t even think he was this bulked up for Rocky Balboa, a movie which was so perfect I didn’t know for sure if he could top it. I cried at two movies in 2006 - Shortbus and Rocky Balboa, no joke. Everyone who goofed on Stallone for reviving these franchises has to be eating major shit right now. These movies are vital, necessary, old-school kick-ass MOVIES with a capital MOVIES.

I did have to give pause at one thing in this masterpiece - the fact that as usual, the major number one bad guy is shown or alluded to, having sex with a guy. Another gay-as-villain cliche? I thought about it for a while, whether I could get over that obviously not so good decision on the part of Sly and the other screenwriter, but I decided that A. If I could come to the thinking during Elephant that Van Sant’s decision to make the two Columbine killers have sex was an unfortunate experiment that proves the one flaw in an otherwise perfect movie, that I could do it with Rambo, a movie that aims itself at audiences with far lower sophistication levels. Excusable? No not really, though it’s plausible that the villain would just HAPPEN to be gay. And B. You can’t have exploitation throughout a movie and then get upset when the group you’re in gets exploited - meaning - I gleefully watched a movie where hundreds of Asian extras are portrayed as super-bad-guys of the lowest common denominator and I let it go and just accept that you gotta have some ethnic group be the bad guy - and if I accept that then I can’t really get upset when they throw gays in the mix somehow. It’s like watching South Park or Family Guy and thinking everything is funny except when they make fun of gays. And C. The cliche of the bad guy being gay just goes with everything else that’s cliche in the movie, and all those cliches and old-school action tropes make it thusly more amazing. Yeah yeah I know there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance going on, and I’m open to being called on it. But if all these roided-out fratboy types can get into Rambo, why can’t the hipster fags too?

At the end of the screening, as the credits rolled, over a single image. Someone made a move that managed to describe the entire message of the movie in two seconds. First he put his hand over the light where the projector was - making a peace symbol with his fingers. Then he switched it quickly, turning it into the middle-finger gesture. Everyone cheered and the 30 or so frat guys in my audience stood up for a standing ovation. Beat that, any other movie in 2008.

Hey, as Rambo says “Live for Nothing. Die for Something.”