Rambo returns
Sylvester Stallone, in tight cashmere, his forearms as ripped as Popeye’s, enters the Los Angeles hotel suite for “a mini press conference.”
The chairs are filled with Rambo reporters, some wearing Rambo bandannas, Rambo T-shirts, Rambo fatigues. It will not be a tough crowd.
First question: “What happened to the shot where you punched the guy’s head clear off?”
The reporter is referring to the so-called “sizzle reel” shown at last year’s Cannes Film Festival to generate interest among overseas distributors for the fourth and perhaps final installment in the Rambo saga.
“Rambo” – written, directed, produced by and starring Stallone – opens today and is perhaps the most graphically violent R-rated movie ever.
“That’s an optical confusion,” Stallone says of the scene in question. “What it was, was a knife, and it was such a bad print it looked like I punched his head off.
“I was reading the blogs. I was, ‘Come on guys, look closely, nobody can punch someone’s head off.’ “
But if anyone could, surely …
“When you’re pushed,” says Stallone’s character, John Rambo, “killing’s as easy as breathing.”
Oh, and his buttons are most definitely pushed in the new movie.
It opens with Rambo, the former Green Beret, seemingly abandoned by both his country and his beloved father figure, Col. Trautman. He’s living as a monosyllabic misanthrope at the Thai Snake Farm, where tourists pay to watch performers harass cobras he collected in the jungle.
It has been two decades since Rambo was last seen fighting alongside the mujaheddin in Afghanistan to rescue Trautman (played by Richard Crenna) from the Russkies in the poorly received “Rambo III.”
The years appear to have been kind to Stallone, 61. His face has softened, tenderized like a piece of flank steak, whacked by a meat mallet. He sports all his unnaturally jet black hair. His skin tone and resilience are excellent.
With a bandanna wrapped around his head in the movie, he resembles Sitting Bull. It is intentional.
“The ponderousness that comes with aging, the sense of weight, the sense of knowledge, of knowing too much, the lack of naivete, which has happened in my life, set the stage for me,” he explains.
“I wanted Rambo to be heavier, bulkier. That’s why his first line in the movie is pretty negative. He’s given up. He has nothing.
“The other Rambos had a bit too much energy, were a bit too spry. I’m not trying to run myself down, but there was much more vanity involved.”
By which he means that shirtless Rambo of yore with pectorals hard as dinner plates, glistening with baby oil? Exactly.
“It was all about body movement rather than the ferocity and commitment of what he was doing,” Stallone says. “This character to me is much more interesting.”
Rambo’s semi-retirement is interrupted by a group of Christian missionaries who hire the idling killing machine to take them upriver to a village of Karen people, an ethnic minority along the Burmese border.
The Karen have been fighting for independence since 1949 and are brutally repressed by the Burmese government forces, represented in the film as sadistic baby-bayonetters.
Soon after Rambo dumps them off, the missionaries and the Karen people are brutally attacked by sinister Burmese government forces in a berserk scene straight out of Hieronymus Bosch (baby thrown into a flamethrower, etc.).
So Rambo and a team of international mercenaries go back with bows and arrows (neck shots), knives (disembowelment) and a .50-caliber machine gun.
Aided by the magic of computer-generated imagery, heads do fly, and in the final killing spree, actual doughnut holes – holes that you can see through – appear in human torsos.
“It’s one of the most violent movies … ” a questioner begins.
Stallone interrupts: “Not one of the most. I worked very hard for this.”
He says he was surprised at the Motion Picture Association of America’s R rating
“When babies are being bayoneted and people are being flamed, I thought this will never go,” Stallone says.
But as he told the ratings board, “I said, ‘Guys, this is happening today – and if we’re ever going to do something that responds, where art has the ability to influence people’s awareness and impact the lives of these people, don’t dilute it, don’t water it down. … Don’t cut away too soon. Let it sink it. I want people to feel it.’
“To their credit, they allowed this film to be as truthful as it could.”
Stallone is referring to the plight of the Karen people and the Burmese military junta that crushed the pro-democracy “Saffron Revolution” led by monks last fall – after the film was wrapped, which manages to make Stallone appear prescient.
“As you look at the opening credits (which contain actual news footage),” he says, “I had to live up to a certain responsibility, because people are dying as we’re making the film. Therefore to just have me running through the film doing these extraordinary heroics I thought would demean what they are going through.
“So they had to have their moment, where you see a village decimated. In fact, it’s even worse.”
Stallone has long been mulling a final (perhaps) Rambo movie. Initially, he says, the studios thought, hey, why not a caper film?
“Like they wanted to have the corrupt CIA agent trying to sell plutonium rods,” he says. “I said no. The biggest and most interesting crisis in the world is a human crisis. It never gets boring. It goes back to Shakespeare. It’s man against man and their intolerance of each other.”
Stallone thought of placing Rambo along the Mexican border, among the human traffickers and wily coyotes.
Then, he says, “I did research and found that Burma is one of the great hellholes of the world. But no one knows about it. It’s exotic and it’s near Vietnam and the synergy was perfect.”
What does it all mean?
“I don’t know if it’s coming across,” Stallone says, but the message is “accept who you are, accept who you are, and finally Rambo does. He accepts it: ‘I kill for myself. I don’t kill for my country.’
“Stop using this excuse that I’m a hero. I’m not. I got this penchant for violence inside of me that has to come out.”