Devil's guide to the movies : Rambo 4

This is the type of movie that you watch to try to count how many people died in bullet pumping action. It's a typically no brainer action movie, which unfortunately, isn't as action packed as I hope it would with the insane trigger happy movie Shoot'em up in mind.

This movie runs for 91 minutes but the first hour was boring. As I was pretty young when the first 3 Rambo movies came out, all I couldn't remember much about the Rambo movies. My impression of Rambo was of a garang muscle-white man who goes around shooting arrows, firing machine guns and knifing bad bad people. That's how the name Rambo became a verb.

"Don't be so Rambo lah! Chiong so fast for what ?"

"Yesterday which Rambo never flush the toilet har?"

As most action movie goes, the plot really sucks and lack depth. Why train so hard to convert his fats to muscles for only 1 movie when you can make 2 movies? Straight after training hard for Rocky Balbora, Sylvester Stallone used his freshly re-made muscles save a group of Christian aid workers who had lost touch with reality. With their noble causes high in their heads, they jumped right into the middle of a Burma war zone and winded up getting hundreds of people killed in the process.

So in Rambo 4, Sylvester Stallone did all the typical Rambo signature moves as John Rambo during the action scenes. Ok, let's go through the Rambo action check list.

1) Bow and arrows - Checked
While people fish using nets, he elected to use the bow and arrows to fish. After arrowing the poor fish, also passed the bounty to a boy on a boat with 2 Buddhist monks. Eh, that doesn't sound right. I thought monks are compassionate to all living things and killing animals should be loudly protested against. He also arrowed a couple of enemy soldiers in the movie for good measure. And guess what the enemy soldiers were doing? There were placing bets on a new sport. That's forcing villagers to run through a mine field and bet on who would die first.

2) Machine gun - Checked

This time round, he didn't carry the machine gun in his arms with chains of ammo that doesn't move an inch even though he was firing non-stop till kingdom comes. He was firing a machine gun on a patrol boat which had around 100 enemy soldiers as cannon folder. In an attempt to make the scene more realistic, he ran out of bullets and had to reload, and he got shot in the process. Unfortunately, he scene was still badly flawed. No one lobbed grenades at him and despite firing non-stop for 10 minutes, there were no spent bullet casing anywhere.

3) Knife - Checked
He knifed the gay enemy leader in the last scene.

4) Bare Hands - Checked

He killed a horny soldier who was going to rape the female lead, Sarah with his bare hands by ripping out the poor chap's throat.

5) RPGs - Checked
An enemy patrol boat was destroyed by a RPG attack from the rebels.

6) Big explosion - Checked
There was a big explosion with a claymore and a old WWII era bomb which killed several dogs and some enemy soldiers.

7) Burning enemy bases - Checked
Rambo burned down an pirate base after murdering them.

8) Lack of Sex - Checked
With only 1 female lead who was attached to a pastor, Rambo had no chance of getting lucky despite clearing an entire army camp to save her. We were compensated with an attempt rape scene where Rambo torn out the would-be rapist's throat and a suggestive scene where the apparently gay pedophile enemy leader close his hut's door with a young boy with him.

9) Lack of Chase Scenes - Checked
Rambo movies do not include chase scenes of any vehicles and this one does not make an exception. No car chase, no boat chase, no place chase what so ever.

10) New stuff - Checked
Mortar shelling and land mines are introduced.

As I have mentioned, the movie has it's boring moments. There was a scene where Rambo became the boatman who was sending a group of mercenaries to save the missionary folks which was terribly boring as it took them a very long time to reach their destination. It's one of those scenes that we didn't need to know how they got there.

The ending credits was just as bad. 5 minutes of Rambo walking back home. Give us a break. Just kill somebody. Oh, it's also the most violent Rambo movie yet.