A rollicking, feel-good family adventure

Rambo - rated R18+

I'll just kick it right off here - Rambo is the greatest film ever.

Considering that there's about a page and a half of script, being the greatest film ever is even more of an accomplishment. This is an action film (Rambo was never going to translate well as a romantic comedy or musical) of the highest order, and is chock-full of scenes where you keep repeating "oooooh shit" and "fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck". You'll pee a little, it's just that good.

The 'story' starts off with a bunch of do-gooder boy scouts going to Burma to do do-gooder boy scout stuff - help with medical shenanigans, read bibles, show them how to line dance and so on. All very nice. Love love love. We're introduced to the situation in Burma courtesy of some actual footage of Burmese soldiers being pretty evil fuckers, shooting peeps and beheading peeps and generally not being nice peeps to other peeps. It's pretty full on, and you get that funny feeling that a whole bunch of explosive-tipped justice is going to be handed out.

Some stuff that doesn't involve anyone being killed happens, so I won't go into much detail about that - I'd probably catalogue the next ten minutes or so under "character development". The fact that Stallone has one look for the entire film (and that look says "fuck you") make these scenes almost unnecessary except as an excuse to show some snake-wrangling, and I'm a sucker for snake-wrangling scenes.

The boy-scout missionaries are captured by evil Burmese soldiers, which is bad news for them, but good news for us, otherwise we'd just be watching Rambo sit around, reading books and going fishing and doing ironing and stuff (actually, there is a fishing scene, but done Rambo style, which automatically makes it awesome). Instead, he goes out into the jungle to rescue them, accompanied by a band of ex-Navy Seals and SAS dudes. The troops are really only there to share in Rambo's awesomeness, and also to get into trouble so he can save them and continue being so awesome at everything. They're a decent bunch of guys, and are able to tell the audience enough about themselves in one line of dialogue of what to expect from them. Things like:
"Just cause I'm a redneck doesn't mean I can't read!"
"They always called me Schoolboy, even back in sniper training."
"I'm an old, cranky man, but I eat nails and shit bullets."

So hooray, we know who everyone is. Redneck, sniper, old man. Gotcha. You know how everyone loved the sniper in 'Saving Private Ryan'? That guy sucks. This new Rambo sniper dude is the duck's nuts, my friends. It made me go out and join a sniper squad. All I have at the moment is a broom that I point at people, but still... are you in a sniper squad? No. Didn't think so.

So they go upstream to where the missionaries were last seen, and the troops tell Rambo to "stay with the boat". We all know Rambo isn't going to "stay with the boat", and thank fuck for that. I didn't pay $15 to watch Rambo play cards while he waits for some other dudes to kill an army and rescue some churchies. And hey, if anyone told Rambo to "go fish", they'd have their legs ripped off and replaced by sticks of dynamite. I'm pretty sure that by this point, Rambo wasn't even thinking of that pile of ironing that he had to do back home, either. So again, good news for us.

During filming, they basically got to this point of the film when Stallone forgot to bring his script to the set. "Let's just blow stuff up from here on in," he says, and because he's (a) Rambo, (b) writer and director, and (c) the best, no-one argued.

And it's glorious. I felt like I was showering in intestines and rolling around in half a cadaver. Reminded me of the good old days.

Sly, you're not too old to do anything. I love you.

Rambo scores fairly highly on the Mister Evil Breakfast Rating Of Movies That I May Or May Not Have Seen (MEBROMTIMOMNHS), and is recommended to everyone in the universe.