I’m having a hard time figuring out what to make of Rambo, mostly due to its odd structure. It really doesn’t resemble any action movie I’ve ever seen before in that regard. In retrospect, something like 75% of the movie is set-up, and the remaining 25% culminates in a grand total of one big action sequence. There are no real “acts” to speak of, there are none of the usual reversals of physical and mental fortune, no mini-climaxes are peppered throughout the running time, there aren’t any mini-bosses or notable henchmen or memorably armed villains that need to be defeated, Rambo is never captured, his mercenary allies are not killed off one by one in various memorable and character-defining ways, nothing. Rambo himself spends the climactic battle essentially stationary behind a gun turret. Meanwhile the buildup to all this is a parade of the most horrifically graphic attacks on civilians I’ve ever seen in an ostensible popcorn movie. Children get shot in the face and set on fire, people get their limbs chopped off with machetes, gun barrels are jammed into bullet holes in still-living victims, limbless people fly through the explosion-filled air like origami throwing stars. It’s like if someone took the set decorations for Colonel Kurtz’s compound in Apocalypse Now, crossed them with the Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan, and made an action movie out of it.
It’s only in articulating these two halves of the movie that I think I see what’s going on here. It’s wrong to characterize John Rambo in the jingoistic killing-machine fashion that his surname usually connotes. I’ve only seen the second and fourth films in this franchise, but in both cases he seems like a profoundly depressed and almost tragic figure, a guy who kills in lieu of crying. In this installment this is expressed with a memorably disorienting black-and-white dream/montage of Rambo’s bloody past adventures, as his present-day self tries to come to terms with what he is. Maybe the reason Rambo eschews the usual ups and downs of action cinema is because John Rambo has only two settings, off and on. When his grief and horror reaches a certain point, the switch is flipped and a bunch of fancy-footwork plotting is completely superfluous–he’s just going to kill until there’s no one left, and then he’ll stop. Seen in that light even his oddly static positioning in the climax makes sense. The whole movie was the forces of human brutality laughing in the world’s face, and there he is with his machine gun, standing there, shouting it down.
The movie ends with Rambo returning to his family’s farm for the first time in decades. Somehow, out of all the things he could have gleaned from the latest bloodbath in which he was forced to take part, he apparently picked up “you can go home again.” To me this is the movie’s falsest note. I wanted to see Rambo fade back into the jungle like bigfoot, always lurking, always ready to slaughter armed men who slaughter unarmed men. War is in his blood, as he says. To see him strolling the homey paths of rural America is like watching Hannibal Lecter disappear into the Caribbean crowd at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. What happens the next time he’s pushed?