This is one stroll down memory lane I just can’t take.
It’s that time of the new year. The winter swoon wherein the movie studios offload their stinkiest and/or cheapest refuse at the box office in the hopes that everyone will either be so done with late fall Quality Cinema, or so primed to get out of the house that they really will see anything. Take Cloverfield (please). Hype, hype, hype, and here’s what the actual viewing experience was like: “Wow, I guess it’s okay to firebomb New York City again…my stomach hurts…yup, still hurts…oh, just kill everybody already so I can go home and have a ginger ale.” Then there’s 27 Dresses. I’d rather see Cloverfield ten times over than sit through 27 Dresses. May the ghost of a pissed off Betty Friedan haunt the women who wrote and directed a chick flick that’s all about how pathetic a woman is if she’s always a bridesmaid and never a bride. And I even think James Marsden is kinda hot. So what’s there to see for a gal who can’t countenance watching Katie Kate Holmes Cruise mince through Mad Money? Who snoozed through Cassandra’s Dream? I know what you’re thinking. Rambo.
Rambo, however, is where I hit the Guy Movie wall with a resounding, multilayered thud. Why is this macho cinema alley so intolerable for someone who doesn’t mind a little Jerry Bruckheimer action nonsense, has a professed affection for the Terminator and Die Hard franchises, and holds Clint Eastwood in the highest esteem? It does seem rather arbitrary on the face of it. Well, here’s one dirty little secret: I’ve never cared for Sylvester Stallone. Rocky leaves me as cold as a Philadelphia winter, and that’s hands down his most appealing movie. But it isn’t just Stallone that fails to thrill me. I like the idea of reanimating John Rambo even less. My aversion to Rambo begins with the fact that from what I can gather (the spectacle of Sylvester Stallone’s dyed black hair and pharmaceutical body), this is one of those exercises in nostalgia that is more retrograde than revisionist. Rambo may be living a quiet life as a river guide in the Thai jungle these days, but hey, he’s always been a loner. He’s also an old hand at Southeast Asia. Remember in which war John Rambo originally fought? Anyone? Anyone? Vietnam. Yeah, that’s how old he is. As the tag line says, old heroes don’t die. They reload.
But it isn’t just Stallone’s unwillingness to age at all, let alone with grace. It’s also the visceral response to the choice of title for this fourth in the series. This isn’t the first of the quartet to go out under the moniker Rambo. Nor was that name in the premiere title of the series, which was so presciently called First Blood. No. Rambo was the title of the sequel, as in Rambo: First Blood Part II. For the sake of brevity, the part after the colon was usually dropped in casual pop culture conversation c. 1985. This I remember as clearly as Nick Rhodes’ penchant for wearing lipstick in Duran Duran videos. Rambo is the movie Ronald Reagan jokingly (yet not) cited for giving him some ideas for how to conduct foreign policy. And correspondingly, Rambo is the movie title and poster image that wags humorously transformed into Ronbo to jab at Reagan’s warmonger posturing. Rambo is the movie a friend of mine quoted on the yearbook spread we shared with two other buddies (Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, Oscar Wilde, Bob Dylan, and René Descartes also made appearances). That friend is stationed in Afghanistan at the moment, as his Rambo fixation was probably a symptom of what inspired him to join the military in the 1990s. He thought he had completed his service a couple of years ago, by the way…but then they pulled him back in. Anyway, when I hear the name Rambo, I cringe.
I also cringe because Rambo: First Blood Part II is a wretchedly cheesy movie. On the one hand, it’s hilarious. Rambo is a walking, mumbling side of beef who gets into a torture situation that is as much an excuse for the half-naked Stallone to flex (while he’s all oiled up and strapped to an electrified bed frame), as it is inadvertent fuel for a porny S/M scenario. Ronald Reagan’s inspiration, ladies and gentleman. It’s up there with 300 in the annals of bizarre homoerotic imagery in films that purport to celebrate good old-fashioned machismo. On the other hand, it’s not hilarious at all because of why Ronald Reagan might have found it inspiring. As we keep learning over and over again, the Vietnam War is the American military albatross that certain individuals perpetually want to correct or avoid. It is the war we the great superpower lost in the midst of the Cold War. “We” got our asses handed to us by a much smaller country because, depending on one’s point of view, the pansy liberals wouldn’t let the military really rip or because we shouldn’t have been there at all. So when ex-Green Beret John Rambo is called upon to rescue P.O.W.s in Cambodia—to return to the scene of the crime, as it were—he has just one question: “Do we get to win this time?” Why yes, Rambo, we do. Give the right man enough guns, arrows, and headbands, and he’ll single-handedly defeat the enemy. Praise the Sly and pass the ammunition.
I suppose it’s not surprising at all, then, that Rambo would reappear at this moment. Hell, I’m tempted to say he’s a few years too late. His brand of rah-rah, we-fight-because-it’s-our-nature pugnacity might have packed ‘em in on the eve of the Iraq War. Then again, he’s also a striking cinematic sign of why we’re in the current foreign policy mess we’re in (and why people who’ve finished their service get sent back to war zones). It isn’t just that attitude, that deep yearning for “Mission Accomplished.” It’s also Rambo III. In that 1988 iteration, Rambo goes to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. He helps the mujahideen. He’s on their side. Yep, that’s right, he’s on Osama bin Laden’s team. You know, the team that we were supposed to be fighting in Iraq because they attacked us in 2001, except that they weren’t really in Iraq at that point, nor were they allied with Saddam Hussein, who was not connected to 9/11 etc. etc. etc. Sorry, Rambo, it seems that the enemy of our enemy was not, in fact, our friend. Oops. Hindsight’s a bitch.
In that way, it does make sense that he rears his dyed head now, rather than five years ago, in a movie called Rambo without any Roman numerals. Re-fighting and winning military conflicts that haven’t gone so well in the real world is his fantasy specialty—and let’s just ignore that one that had a III in the title after the Name. He doesn’t go into Iraq, though. Stallone may be a meathead on screen, but he’s not stupid. Or he’s just waiting until Rambo V to go into Fallujah and kick some Sunni ass, or Shiite ass, or whoever’s ass isn’t the enemy of our enemy at the moment. Instead, he makes a mission to Burma (did he not hear the news that it’s now called Myanmar?). He’s apparently everything we want our mercenaries to be: a killer with a moral compass who is also just doing what he is supposed to do. He does not cut and run. He intervenes in a conflict that has nothing to do with him directly because the bad guys are just really really bad. He would like to be the international coalition in Kosovo. Unfortunately, for this viewer, he is more vividly the mindset that got us into Iraq: the desire to “win this time” because the wimps who were in charge before didn’t finish the job. I’m sorry, but I just can’t go there. That brand of macho fantasyland has caused way too much destruction in the past decade.
Plus, I still haven’t forgiven Rocky for beating Taxi Driver for Best Picture. Speaking of violent, troubled Vietnam vets…
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
