Rambo, Blu-Ray Review

Posted on: January 13th, 2009 By: Kirk

When you think of a Rambo film you think of a pumped up Sylvester Stallone shooting from the hip, dodging bullets left right and centre whilst killing and entire army by himself. Unfortunately this view of the character is left over from the sequels to the original First Blood. If we return the roots of the character from the first film we see a different person. This is the story of a man, honed into a killing machine for a war that the people didn’t believe in. On returning home he finds it hard to fit in to normal society and so goes travelling to find his old army buddies. On passing through a small town in the American back woods, John Rambo unjustly falls foul of the local Sheriff. When he retaliates and flees a man hunt is on which involves Rambo making an idiot of the local law, followed by the national guard. Unfortunately as the series went on, the action got sillier and by the end Stallone was competing with Schwarzenegger for the title of best action film hero.

Twenty six years after the release of the original film John James Rambo is back. The good news is that as with the recent Rocky film, the new Rambo harkens back to the mood of the original movie, not the latter films in the series. An older, wiser, world-weary Rambo is now eking out a living in Thailand. He makes his living from his boat fishing and trading in snakes. When a group of church going Americans ask him to take them up river to Burma he simply tells them to go home. Knowing the atrocities that are occurring there he knows that the bibles and medical supplies they take will have little or no impact on the underlying political problems, but may well end up costing them their lives.

After the token woman of the group, Sarah played by Julie Benz, manages to talk Rambo round they head up river. An encounter with some river pirates reminds us that, though older and world-weary, Rambo hasn’t lost his knack for carnage. The do-gooders are shocked and appalled by his explosion of violence, not recognising that the alternative was their own deaths and the repeated raping of Sarah. After dropping off the group at their destination Rambo returns to his life of fishing and snake catching, ignorant that the village the group travelled to was attacked by a ruthless local general who’s men massacred the locals with ferocious brutality and captured four of the group, including Sarah and their leader Michael.

Several weeks later Rambo is visited by the pastor of the church group. They’re now ten days overdue and the pastor has learned of their fate. He’s been forced to hire a band of mercenaries to try and rescue the captured team members, as the government lacks the will to mount a rescue mission. The pastor knows nothing of Rambo’s past, he just needs him to take the mercenaries to where he dropped them off. The mercenaries are a strange band of American and British ex-soldiers lead by a mouthy, obnoxious ex-SAS man called Lewis. With one exception, the sniper of the group, the mercenaries show no respect for Rambo, just thinking of him as ‘the boat man’. On reaching their goal Rambo is told in no uncertain terms to stay with the boat, instead he decides to follow the group and wreak some havoc, and here the real meat of the film begins. The mission is to sneak into the enemy army camp, rescue the hostages and get back to the boat before the soldiers find they’re gone. As with all of these films though, it never goes that smoothly!

I’m glad to say that Rambo’s return is a complete triumph. Its mood is more of the first film than the sequels but they’ve taken the violence and gore up a notch and a half. At the beginning of the film there’s a very brief bit of exposition giving you some impression of the atrocities occurring in Burma under the current regime. Stallone doesn’t go into the politics of the situation and the film is all the better for it. Instead it shows you in graphic detail the brutal murder of the local villagers by the army regulars. This may prompt those ignorant of the situation, such as myself, to go and read about what’s happening in Burma after the film has ended.

This film is centred around one particular general and his attachment of 100 odd soldiers. They raid local villages killing and raping, taking the young boys as conscripts. The violence is shown in graphic detail, but Stallone doesn’t linger on any one piece, instead moving the camera on quickly to a new piece of bloodshed. I thought this approach was very effective, you didn’t have time to be appalled by any one act of brutality, as the action very quickly moved on, giving you the overall impression of the atrocities taking place. In showing the inhuman actions of the soldiers in the first instance you also don’t mind so much at the bloody revenge that Rambo bestows. Rather you’re cheering him on as he eventually rends their flesh in a hail of bullets, they deserved it after all!

Stallone does a cracking job of bring the older Rambo convincingly back to the big screen. He’s no longer a one man army, the mercenaries get to kick some ass helping him out as well. He might be 62 years old but Stallone can still hack it, there’s no sign of the action taking on a geriatric pace, when it needs to it’s as quick fire as any action film out there. Now I’m not a huge fan of graphic gore. I do admit to cringing a bit during the opening scenes of Robocop as Murphy gets blown to smithereens. The level of gore in this is along those lines, but as already mentioned, because it doesn’t linger on any one act I found it watchable and it elevates the film to a more serious and intense level.

For this Blu Ray release Lionsgate have done a bang up job with the picture. This is probably one of the best Blu Rays I’ve seen. The picture is consistent in its high level of detail, the colours are a bit muted but that’s more to do with the actual film than the transfer. Dark night scenes retain a good level of depth and detail and at no time did I find myself straining to see what was going on. It’s a similar case with sound as well. Here we are blessed with a full 7.1 DTS-HD lossless master audio track. Dialogue is clear and the action scenes are just amazing, your subwoofer is going to get a good workout from this little disc. If you want to show off your nice shiny HD video and audio setup this film will do both as well as being a damn good Rambo film, what more could you want!

As well as the excellent video and audio we’re also treated to a wealth of extras. There’s a very good commentary by Sylvester Stallone himself, some pretty good featurettes which detail the development of the project, it’s editing, audio score weapons used during production (oh yeah baby, now we’re talkin’!) etc. etc. There are six in all but as already mentioned the film doesn’t really go into the politics behind the situation in Burma, the film would’ve gotten stuck in some seriously boggy ground if it did, but for those that want to find out a bit more there is an excellent featurettes that goes into more detail on the subject. As well as those extras that are shared with the DVD there are also HD specific items. There’s a picture-in-picture element that goes with the commentary mentioned above that shows lots of behind the scenes footage as well as some branching featurettes.

If you’re an action film fan then don’t worry about Sly’s advancing years, this, in my opinion, is nearly as good as the original and way better than parts II and III. If you have the kit for HD then I whole-heartedly recommend the Blu Ray, the picture and sound are well worth it.