Product Description
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The next chapter finds Rambo recruited by missionaries to
protect them during a humanitarian aid effort on behalf of the
persecuted Karen people of Burma. After the missionaries are
taken prisoner by Burmese soldiers, Rambo gets a second
impossible job: rescue the missionaries in the midst of a civil
war.
.com
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If you've been wondering what ever happened to ex–Green Beret
superwarrior John Rambo since he singlehandedly up a Pacific
Northwest town (First Blood, 1982), returned to the jungles of
'Nam to free U.S. POWs held long after war's end (Rambo: First
Blood Part II, 1985), and interrupted the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan long enough to blow lots of stuff up and rescue his
old commandant from the Reds (Rambo III, 1988), then Rambo (2008)
is for you. Without so much as a IV to dilute the brand name,
Rambo--which is what most of us called the second, most iconic
film in the series--may aspire to open a new era for a pop
legend. But it's a thoroughly mechanical attempt to reanimate a
franchise that, absent the anger, frustration, and self-loathing
of the post-Vietnam years, has no meaning or purpose. For some
time now Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) has been putt-putting along
the Thai-Burmese border in a longboat, catching exotic snakes to
sell. As for the 60-year civil war in Burma between the brutal
government and the Karen independence movement, he ignores it.
Enter a party of American missionaries whose dewy blond
spokeswoman (Dexter's Julie Benz) asks Rambo to haul them upriver
so that they can bring medical aid to the insurgents. After the
requisite number of monosyllabic refusals, he does. Soon
afterward the do-gooders are in a world of hurt, and he's
summoned to lead a squad of mercenaries on a rescue mission.
As storytelling, the latest Rambo is the most bare-s of the
bunch. Rambo has little to say, so it's especially galling that
Stallone, as director and co-writer, obliges him to have
essentially the same conversation at three different points (the
final distillation: "Live for nothing or die for something"). The
Burmese army goons seem in competition to commit the most hideous
atrocity (e.g., child skull-crushing underfoot), the better to
justify the eventual, lovingly protracted spectacle of them being
eviscerated by high-powered weaponry. Although in Thailand,
the movie has mostly been photographed in brown, reducing any
particular sense of place but, perhaps, perversely increasing our
gratitude for the splashes of purple whenever hot metal tatters
. --Richard T. Jameson
Beyond Rambo
Complete list of Rambo movies on DVD and Blu-ray (
/lm/R2CTPERNOBD2DU/ref=d_ap_rambo_1 )
Soundtrack ( /gp/product/B00126WY14/ref=d_ap_rambo_2 )
Rambo: The Complete Collector's Set (
/gp/product/B0015XHP4A/ref=d_ap_rambo_3 )
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Set Contains:
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Sylvester Stallone is everywhere to be seen in the Special
Features for Rambo, from his growling commentary track to the six
featurettes included here. The usual stuff is covered: a
six-minute take on how Brian Tyler's music incorporates Jerry
Goldsmith's themes from previous Rambo outings, a 15-minute look
at the weaponry of the film, a 10-minute bit on the film's
release, which includes interviews with most of the cast about
attending the Las Ve premiere. During an 8-minute featurette
about the editing, we learn that the movie's R rating came as a
surprise to the filmmakers, since the version submitted to the
ratings board was assumed to be NC-17. More substantially, a
20-minute doc gives Stallone's canny directorial tactic for this
long-awaited sequel, which was to shoot the movie as though the
edgy, unstable Rambo himself were directing. The most important
of the extras is not a production piece but a 10-minute primer on
the disastrous human-rights situation in Burma (whose government
calls the country Myanmar), in which experts conclude that Rambo
might well introduce the situation to an audience that was
unaware of it before. Special Edition purchasers will also get a
second disc containing a downloadable digital copy of the film.
--Robert Horton
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