It’s not a movie. It’s an adrenaline pump and purveyor of raw carnage.
Rambo (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:140
Fresh:52
Rotten:88
Average Rating:4.8/10
Consensus: Sylvester Stallone knows how to stage action sequences, but the movie's uneven pacing and excessive violence (even for the franchise) is more nauseating than entertaining.
Rated: 18 [See Full Rating] for strong graphic bloody violence, sexual assaults, grisly images and language.
Runtime: 1 hr 33 mins
Genre: Action/Adventure
Theatrical Release:22-02-2008
Synopsis:
Twenty years after the last film in the series, John Rambo (SYLVESTER STALLONE) has retreated to northern Thailand, where he's running a longboat on the Salween River. On the nearby Thai-Burma...
Twenty years after the last film in the series, John Rambo (SYLVESTER STALLONE) has retreated to northern Thailand, where he's running a longboat on the Salween River. On the nearby Thai-Burma (Myanmar) border, the world's longest-running civil war, the Burmese-Karen conflict, rages into its 60th year. But Rambo, who lives a solitary, simple life in the mountains and jungles fishing and catching poisonous snakes to sell, has long given up fighting, even as medics, mercenaries, rebels and peace workers pass by on their way to the war-torn region.
That all changes when a group of human rights missionaries search out the "American river guide" John Rambo. When Sarah (JULIE BENZ) and Michael Bennett (PAUL SCHULZE) approach him, they explain that since last year's trek to the refugee camps, the Burmese military has laid landmines along the road, making it too dangerous for overland travel. They ask Rambo to guide them up the Salween and drop them off, so they can deliver medical supplies and food to the Karen tribe. After initially refusing to cross into Burma, Rambo takes them, dropping off Sarah, Michael and the aid workers...
Less than two weeks later, pastor Arthur Marsh (KEN HOWARD) finds Rambo and tells him the aid workers did not return and the embassies have not helped locate them. He tells Rambo he's mortgaged his home and raised money from his congregation to hire mercenaries to get the missionaries, who are being held captive by the Burmese army. Although the United States military trained him to be a lethal super soldier in Vietnam, decades later Rambo's reluctance for violence and conflict are palpable, his scars faded, yet visible. However, the lone warrior knows what he must do...
Sylvester Stallone writes, directs and stars as RAMBO, filmed on location in and around Chiang Mai, Thailand. Also starring are Julie Benz (Dexter), Paul Schulze (The Sopranos), Matthew Marsden (Resident Evil: Extinction, Black Hawk Down), Graham McTavish (HBO's Rome), Rey Gallegos (American Wedding), Tim Kang ("Third Watch"), Jake La Botz (Ghost World), Maung Maung Khin and Ken Howard. RAMBO is produced by Avi Lerner, Kevin King Templeton and John Thompson. Executive producers Randall Emmett, George Furla. Executive Producers Jon Feltheimer, Peter Block, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein. Executive Producers Andreas Thiesmeyer, Josef Lautenschlager. Executive Producers Danny Dimbort, Boaz Davidson, Trevor Short. --© Lionsgate
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Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Matthew Marsden, Graham McTavish
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Matthew Marsden, Graham McTavish, Rey Gallegos, Jake LaBotz, Tim Kang, Ken Howard
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Screenwriter: Sylvester Stallone, Art Monterastelli
Producer: Sylvester Stallone, Avi Lerner, John Thompson, Kevin King
Composer: Brian Tyler
Studio: Lions Gate Films
Reviews for Rambo
The movie might satisfy bloodthirsty action fans, but for most people, this is one Stallone do-over we could have done without.
Rambo combines an unapologetic return to the grand action-movie tradition of blowing **** up with a Saw-era interest in close-ups of human viscera. The problem is that the moral meaning of the gore keeps changing.
This is Rambo for a new generation--bigger, more violent, and yet somehow a little smarter and nuanced too. It's not high art, but who expects that from a Rambo movie to begin with?
Stallone (who looks fit but mostly keeps his shirt on) has no intention of bogging the action down, but it's still a notably cheerless exercise, without knowing winks or stabs (pardon the expression) at humor.
Someone finally got it; a violent action movie that delivers violent action, popular conventions be damned.
For a brief moment in this alarmingly grisly fourth Rambo movie, it seems as though Sylvester Stallone might be (literally and figuratively) trying to say something. Turns out, not.
Hollow, hopeless, horridly written and wholly unpleasant. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a conventional narrative being any thinner than the one in Rambo.
After the moderate success of Rocky, Sly is desperate to revive his other popular franchise, but the new actioner, which exploits Burma's political conflict, is so retro and poorly executed that it doesn't even serve as mindless popcorn entertainment.
Stays on the verge of being a rousing dumbass flick at all times -- you've never seen so many mid-air organs -- yet its combination of outrageous bodily trauma and beagle-eyed moments of reflection never quite makes it go over the top.
The battle sequences are so muddled in execution that we can't tell who's killing whom. Which may have been the point, but knowing Stallone -- and Rambo -- one doubts that very much.
It's a middling movie both in terms of the franchise and in terms of action movies in general.
The original Rambo movie was actually titled First Blood...This one should be called Entirely Too Much Blood.
If you don't want all the schmaltzy stuff, there is plenty of a**-kicking to make you happy.
Stallone is back. Rambo is back. It even ends with a nice bookend to First Blood. You might pick apart some of the plot or some of the mercenary dialogue, but that's not the point. The point is to give Rambo fans the ultimate Rambo movie.
Latest News for Rambo
September 08, 2009:
Stallone Releases Synopsis, First Poster for Rambo 5 ![]()
You heard that the fifth "Rambo" was going to pit the titular hero against a drug-dealing slave ring, but as it turns out, Sylvester Stallone's plans for the next sequel are a... More...
August 31, 2009:
Fifth Rambo Gets a Green Light ![]()
Sylvester Stallone will "fight his way through human traffickers and drug lords to rescue a young girl abducted near the U.S.-Mexico border" in the fifth "Rambo" installment,... More...
January 29, 2009:
Stallone Mulling Over Another Rambo ![]()
Are you ready for more Rambo? Sylvester Stallone is -- and he's just told Extra that the only thing he needs to do is decide "whether to do it in America or a foreign country." More...
July 28, 2008:
RT on DVD: Harold & Kumar, Doomsday and Dark City Director's Cut
Since we're all still recovering from Comic-Con 2008, and tons of new home video details dropped at the Largest Nerd Gathering in the World, it's time for RT on DVD: Geek... More...
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