Rambo

Rambo (2008) is the fourth in the series and arrived after a twenty year gap. John Rambo lives on a river in Thailand, catching and selling snakes and speaking to nobody. A group of American missionaries asks him for a boat to cross into Burma. He refuses, then agrees. They disappear on the other side and he goes back with the mercenaries sent to retrieve them. The background is real: the Burmese military regime's attacks on the Karen people had been running for years at that point with little international attention. The film shows village raids, minefields and forced conscription directly. The level of violence is far above the rest of the series and that is deliberate. Stallone abandoned the adventure register of the earlier films entirely; here the fighting is not clean and nobody dies heroically. Stallone directed, wrote and starred; he was sixty one. Rambo barely speaks; he has fewer lines here than in any other film in the series. It was shot in Thailand, in areas close to the border. It was reported that the film was banned in Burma, entered the country on pirated copies regardless, and that some of its lines were taken up in resistance circles. The fighting in the final section is nearly continuous. It runs 92 minutes. Good for: action, followers of the series, and harsh war sequences. Less good for: the violence is extremely graphic, the political context is simplified, and the saviour narrative is contested.