The other day I said that any modern-day action movie that tried to out-batshit crazy Chuck Norris’s Invasion U.S.A. was doomed to failure. I said that because of scenes like these:

(SPOILER ALERT on this next one…)

But the more I watch these two Internet-only John Rambo trailers, the more I feel like I may have to eat my words.

It’s hard to judge based on trailers alone, but it seems to me that the reason that John Rambo stands to be far more successful at being viscerally exciting than the self-aware (read: “self-conscious”) approach of Shoot ‘Em Up is that it’s not setting out to be crazy. It’s setting out to be extremely violent, which is has some venn-diagram overlap with crazy but is not entirely contiguous with it, and thus far it’s really good at what it’s setting out to do.

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