An Extended Cut of Violence

After a twenty year gap, Rambo returned. The question at the time was: did anyone want him to come back? It had been two decades since he’d last graced theater screens, in the not exactly well received (although still financially successful enough) Rambo III, and at the time it felt like those three Rambo films (including First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II) were enough to give the character his legacy. He’d come back from Vietnam damaged and broken, went back to Vietnam and “won” the war, and then, just for good measure, went to Afghanistan and “won” the Cold War, too. What more was there for him to do?

Stallone even, for a time, felt the same way. He was reluctant to come back and reprise the character after so many years, and when Miramax (who bought up the rights to the franchise from the bankrupt Carolco) said they were going to make a sequel or continuation, Stallone didn’t even want to sign on. But eventually he was lured back to the project, acting as not only one of its screenwriters (along with Art Monterastelli) but also as the film’s director. He even later put out a director’s cut of the film, John Rambo, which is the version I watched for this review (because it was the version in my movie collection, and I didn’t have the streaming service the normal cut was on at the time).

And, well… the film still struggles to find balance between the different sides of the Rambo storytelling. Much of the film is devoted to exploring John’s character, trying to get at the heart of who he is all these years later. That’s the kind of storytelling that was done best in First Blood, which is still (for me) the best of the run. But then, in the midst of this excellent storytelling there are spots of action and violence that don’t come across as an extension of the story; it’s action for the sake of action, brutal, over-the-top, and excessively gory. This feels more like Rambo III, where action is more important than anything else. John Rambo is torn between these two motivations and it never quite settles on one side or the other like it needs to, making it a weaker film than it could have been.

Twenty years after he walked off the battlefield in Afghanistan, John Rambo (Stallone, of course) is still living in Thailand, running a small boat service while doing various odd-job tasks (like hunting snakes and selling them to a snake show) and living a life away from everything. His quiet existence, though, is down river from Burma, where a civil war has been raging for decades. John doesn’t engage, doesn’t stick his nose into what’s happening just a few hours away via his boat. War is war, and it never ends, and he doesn’t see the point in trying to change anything now.

A group of Christian missionaries, though, have other ideas. Led by Dr. Michael Burnett (Paul Schulze) and Sarah Miller (Julie Benz), the group wants to go into Burma to help the locals, not just to teach them about God but also to give medical aid. John thinks that’s dumb since the only thing that will help is guns and violence (at least in his eyes). Eventually he agrees to help ferry them down river and, to the shock of no one watching this film, after leaving his boat the group is soon captured by the Burmese military. Now a group of mercenaries have to go in after the missionaries and rescue them, and, of course, Rambo comes along for the ride.

Much like with Rambo III, there’s a core to the story of Rambo (aka John Rambo in its extended cut) that almost works. The third film wanted to bring attention to the Soviet Union’s actions in Afghanistan, which was a noble idea (as long as we ignore what the Taliban got up to in the years after), and you can see Stallone reaching for something similar here. The war for Burma (or Myanmar now) had been raging for years, and even after the release of this movie would continue to go on as the military government solidified power, lost power, reclaimed power, and on and on. It’s a mess over there (at least from the perspective of a guy that pays a little attention to politics but mostly just watches genre movies) and I respect the idea of bringing more attention to what was going on.

With that said, John Rambo follows a very clumsy path to its message. The film juxtaposes our hero, John Rambo, against missionary Sarah Miller. She thinks there’s reason to spread hope and to try and bring change to the region (which, considering the military junta was overthrown in 2011 and civilian control of the region reigned for a time, she was sort of right), and people need to at least try and bring good into the world. John argues that war is war and the only thing waiting for them in Burma is violence and death (which, considering a new military junta eventually overthrew the elected civilian government in 2020 and has been reigning ever since, he’s also sort of right). The film wants us to believe that John needs to see Sarah’s way of the world so he can find some peace.

Except then the missionaries are captured, John has to go in, and every action he takes seems to cement his world view. The missionaries are almost instantly captured. Many of them are killed alongside so many of the villagers they were trying to help (while teenage boys are conscripted, and young women are captured so they can be raped and whored out). John and the mercenaries – Matthew Marsden as "School Boy", Graham McTavish as Lewis, Tim Kang as En-Joo, Rey Gallegos as Diaz, and Jake La Botz as Reese – end up killing so many people, just absolutely a ludicrous number of people, to save just a handful of villagers and missionaries, seemingly proving John right. The film sets up one message, and then undermines it at every turn.

Maybe, one could argue, the film can find a way to spread its message by putting John against a villain so bad that killing them brings a kind of peace. In the same way that John “won” the Afghani Civil War in Rambo III, we could argue that John went in and helped “win” the Saffron Revolution for Burma, helping to free its people. You can sort of see that, except the film also undermines this idea by never making its Burmese villains anything more than cartoon characters. We don’t get real character development for military leader Major Pa Tee Tint (Maung Maung Khin) or any of his men. We see them do evil, horrible things but there’s never any attempt to engage with them as characters, leaving them generically bad guys ready to be killed.

And bear in mind, I’m not saying the bad guys have to be given tragic backstories so we can see their point of view. Villains can be villains and that’s fine. But we need to understand them at some level, to at least view them as people. Hell, we need to know their names so we can identify them, and I don’t think I even once learned Major Pa Tee Tint’s name during the whole of the film. There was a point where a character that looked a lot like him dies at one point in the film, and then I saw him walking around later and I was so confused because all the villains were so generic and basic in this movie you can’t tell one from the next.

All of this leads to a very lopsided film that doesn’t really understand the story it’s trying to tell. And that doesn’t even get to the fact that the film absolutely glorifies its violence. There are bursts of action throughout the film that feel more heightened then that need to be, but it’s the climax of the film that takes the cake. Here, John and the mercs end up getting surrounded by hundreds of Burmese soldiers, and while the mercs use their smaller guns and grenades, John grabs up a massive, 50 caliber (maybe larger, I don’t know guns) mini-gun and starts blasting away. Men are blown apart, guts and blood fly everywhere, body parts rain down. The movie gives in to all its worst impulses just to have a massive action spectacle (because it’s a Rambo film and that’s what you do, I guess) and it completely loses itself in the moment.

The film didn’t need to do this. The mercs were all running to Rambo’s boat. The story could have just let them escape, maybe have Rambo stealthily take out a couple of soldiers or, getting back to his roots, incapacitate them before fleeing. It could have had Rambo learn that he didn’t have to kill to save the missionaries, and that maybe he could find peace without giving into his bloody ways. But the film needed the big action climax, I suppose, and so it goes with the most over-the-top ending it can think of, giving us nothing but carnage and war and death.

Rambo (or John Rambo, if you prefer) is a film that can never find its true footing. It wants to tell a real, serious story that brings light to a dark region of the globe. It wants to have a message, and drama, and mean something. But then it becomes nothing more than wanton action spectacle right when it needs to sell its message most. It ruins its own story by being just another Rambo film, and it's so much weaker for it.