#this blog has become me just making third wheel content and honestly

[dezzyparrish]

Rambo, John J. ! (all 5 of the Bloods)

... This is not a review.  This is more of a rant.  Content Warning.  This post is going to have so many bad things in it.  Racism, mysogyny, graphic violence, rape, forced drug use, post-traumatic stress, torture, war, and hate.  I can’t stress this enough and I’m serious, there is some seriously ugly shit that I’m discussing. Don’t read if you don’t want it in your brain.

I also might need to get better at my Content Warnings, when I’m nervous I try to be entertaining, and the above elements are not entertaining subjects.

I saw Rambo: Last Blood while Physically Distancing (I misspelled that Psychically Distancing and it’s kind of appropriate too!)

If you have not seen this movie, don’t.  It leaves a stain on your soul.  I’ve been worried about even writing about it, because in the writing, I’m giving it attention and as POTUS45 has shown us in SPADES for the past 4 years plus, Bad Attention is just as good as Good Attention.

Sigh.  I hate this. It’s just a matter of time that someone is gonna discover this blog and give me shit.

So, the Rambo flicks.  I watched the first four. Except for the first movie, First Blood, they’re all mediocre to bad movies, but fun.  First Blood is a good movie, it deserves all the credit it gets.

I watched the trailers for Last Blood and was really interested in this movie.  It looked like a book-end to the long (damn near 40 year) story of Captain John Rambo.  When we meet John, he’s a drifter, a Vietnam Veteran only a few years out of his war.  He’s hitch-hiking and visiting his old brothers-in-arms from the war, finding that, over the years many have died, others are in the same PTSD place he’s lived in.  We learn, by “drifter”, we mean “homeless”.  He wanders into the wrong small town, the sheriff and his deputies arrest him, abuse him, trigger his trauma as a Special Forces soldier and a Prisoner of War, and Rambo snaps and falls into his dark and scary mental spot where he is *back* in the Jungle fighting for his life.  The movie ends with the Sheriff’s office destroyed, the Sheriff machinegunned by an M-60 and bleeding out on the roof, and John’s old unit Commander, Colonel Trautman talking him back to reality and the present world.  John gives a monologue that gives powerful voice to the injustice, frustrations and rage of the soldiers who came home from Vietnam only to find that they couldn’t really come home.  This was in 1982, and as a society, the US was still wrestling with the divide over Vietnam, First Blood is fully in the “Vets are forgotten and hated by their country” camp.  My personal politics have evolved over the decades but even today as a long-haired pinko almost-Commie in California I still find it powerful.  This is John Rambo’s first story, he came home from war and found no peace, no end to his war.

Rambo: First Blood part II went from a drama with a little action to a full blown blockbuster style action flick.  Trautman recruits John from jail (since.. in the first film he destroys a town, and shoots the shit out of everything) for a special mission to return to Vietnam and win the war by saving forgotten POWs.  First Blood part II is two hours of explosions, stabbity, arrow grenades, strafing the ground from a helicopter, betrayal from the CIA, Russkies!  blood, blood and more blood.  First Blood part II really establishes the franchise as movies that aren’t very deep and John Rambo as an Action Superhero (with an Action figure toy line and a Saturday Morning Cartoon).  It’s “fun!” and ridiculous.   Rambo kills the Bad Guy (TM) by shooting him *WITH AN EXPLODING ARROW*, blowing Bad Guy to Hell in a shower of gobbity bits.  John Rambo’s second story, he starts in social isolation (prison), gets dragged back into War, then ends up walking into the distance searching for peace.  Remember that, it’s gonna come back over and over again.

Rambo III finds John in a Monastery somewhere in the world trying to find peace.  Trautman finds him (which is another recurring theme.. no matter where John goes in the world, War finds him and drags him back) and recruits him to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.  John refuses and Trautman has to start the secret mission on his own, and is captured by the Soviets, drawing Rambo into the conflict.  We’re gonna pause right here to bring up some history and some theming..

Rambo III tried to pay off on two real life promises.  The first is a theme in the franchise.  First Blood was about Vietnam, which the Soviets are indirectly referred to as a power using the war as a proxy for the US.  The Soviets are at this point are indirectly an antagonist.  In First Blood Part II, we see a Russian Spetznaz (spelling) “advising” the Vietnamese army on how best to use all those American prisoners.  The Soviets aren’t the main antagonist of Part II, but they make an appearance.  Rambo III pays this off by finally squaring Rambo off directly against the Red Army in a slug-fest.  The Hollywood version of the prize-fight war between the United States and the USSR for the SUPERPOWER CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE WOOOOOOORRRRRLD!  hypehypehype!  Rambo III also makes a second promise because in 1989 the Soviet Union was fighting a 10 year long Guerilla War against the Mujahidin in Afghanistan.  The US was supporting the Mujahidin fighters with support and modern weapons, tipping the balance against the Red Army.  Rambo III was supposed to be the cinematic Call to Arms for the US to enter Afghanistan and throw a knock-out blow against the hated Russians.  Except, in 1989, just before the movie was released, the Soviets *withdrew* from Afghanistan.  They ended the war and went home.  There was an historic profession of the last column of Soviet Tanks crossing back into the USSR, and in the last tank, the Red Army Commander was the last soldier to pull out in defeat.  Before Rambo III was released, but after it was made.  So that movie flopped.  It was a call-to-arms for a war that was over.

CONTENT WARNING: HARD CORE RACISM HERE

Ok, back from that aside. Rambo III starts to get more cringy, but we’re still in the ‘80s, almost the ‘90s and This was Reagan’s America as it became Poppy Bush’s New World Order.  So, John Rambo coming to Afghanistan and becoming a better Afghani than the people who live there is pretty par-for-the course.  I mean there’s a scene where John plays Horse Soccer with all the fighters and using a severed goat head as the ball.  Bloody, severed goat head. (Message: Brown People in other parts of the world are unsophisticated, and savage.)  John almost single handedly wins the sport for his team and is accepted as one of the fighters.. all the Mujahidin surround him with cheers and congratulate him in broken English.. because again, when you are in your home freaking country playing your own sport, you must try to appease the American Demigod by only talking to him in English, the language of Awesome!  There’s more wartime violence and torture with shooting, and stabbity and explosions.  

At one point John is wounded (OH NO) and has to crawl into a cave by himself.. bleeding and dying. He pours the powder from a bullet into his wound and lights it on fire to cauterize it. He’s all better after the scene transition.  Everything is good. Then goes back to killing Russians, rescuing Trautman and winning the proxy war against the hated Commie Red Russians.  This is John Rambo’s third story, he starts in social isolation, is dragged back into war, and ends up walking into the distance looking for peace.

John Rambo, Rambo IV is more of the same.  it’s the first Rambo movie I didn’t see in theatres but, I did cue it up the first time I saw it pop on to the streaming networks.  It starts the same way that al the previous installments do.  John Rambo living a solitary life, trying to come to grips with his life.  This time he’s back in Southeast Asia when some Christian Missionaries contact him to serve as a guide into Myanmar (which was in the midst of a Civil War).  John warns them off and refuses the offer.  The Missionaries go anyway and vanish into the jungle, taken prisoner by the Army (strongly implied if not outright mentioned, I honestly can no longer recall, of the Real World Authoritarian Totalitarian Government that siezed power at that time).  Rambo is once again pulled into a war to save the White Christian Missionaries from the Evil Heathen People. 

CONTENT WARNING - RACISM, MYSOGENY, RAPE and GRAPHIC VIOLENCE.

During the movie, somewhere in Act 2, we see the Missionary Woman prisoner of the Army, locked in a little bamboo cell just like the ones in the Vietnamese POW camp in First Blood Part II.  In comes the guard to get himself some rapin’ done.  Leering and laughing, the woman terrified.. and just as the music gets to it’s most menacing, guard gasps in surprise and Rambo’s beefy hand grabs his throat from the darkness.  Then, over the next 20 seconds, John Rambo digs his fingers into the guy’s throat, blood gushing and going everywhere, then Rambo tears his god damn throat out.  With his bare hand.  Rambo has murdered his way through two and a half movies by this point we’ve watched countless faceless goons, soldiers and thugs shot, stabbed, blown up, gunned down.  In fact the only movie where John Rambo doesn’t commit mass murder is First Blood.  One guy dies, by accident, by his own foolishness and John doesn’t kill him, dude falls out of his helicopter.  There’s an argument that the sheriff dies of his wounds, but if he did it was off-screen after the credits and we see him wheeled out by paramedics. But this poor bastard.. rapey guard, we get to linger on his very bloody, excruciating death for 20 fucking seconds.  I mean at least the previous 400 guys died fast.  During the Escape of Act 3, Rambo commandeers a mounted heavy machine gun in a truck and turns it on the pursuing soldiers.  This is a huge gun, an old Soviet anti-aircraft weapon designed to shoot down Attack Helicopters and the first thing Rambo does is turn it on the poor guy in the drivers seat of the truck  like a foot and a half away from the muzzle and vaporize him (at least he went fast, if gruesomely), then turns the gun on the soldiers, who attack in waves and we get a montage of dudes getting blown to little bitty pieces by a Heavy Machine gun.  Missionaries saved, woman’s virtue preserved, lesson learned (don’t spread the white man’s faith to godless heathens in a war zone).  and John Rambo walks into the distance, looking for peace.

CONTENT WARNING - EVERYTHING

Rambo V: Last Blood had some promise.  I saw the trailers and they showed John back in the US, on a farm, with a family.  I was looking forward to the book-end of John Rambo’s story.  One last fight for an old soldier.  John would likely die in the end, he’s mortal man after all, and looking back through the movie history, he had to be seventy or more by the time this movie opens.

HOOO BOY WAS I WRONG

Look, I’ve spent a LOT of words giving context in detail of the four previous movies, and I’ve been critical of all of them.  But even the most problematic of the Rambo Movies, there was a break in the cringe.  Maybe they’re a product of the time in which they were made, maybe it was that the violence just became cartoon-silly after a while.  The Rambo movies were.. fun.  Stupid, hyperviolent, problematic fun, but there’s a whole pop-culture subgenre of making silly references to Rambo.  From Hot Shots to Tropic Thunder, a thousand short comedy skits.  This movie though.

I can’t go into detail like I did earlier.  It’s that bad.  But John Rambo has finally found a home in the Southwest of America.  His Country has taken him back in.  He is a father-figure to a daughter who is on the verge of going to college.  He breaks in horses like a cowboy.   He has a tunnel complex dug beneath the whole of the property where he has every personal weapon known to mankind and a forge where he blacksmiths knives and a damascus steel letter opener as a “go to college present for said young adult adopted daughter.

Girl learns of her birth father in Mexico, just across the border.  Daddy Rambo warns her not to go “You don’t know the DARKNESS in men’s hearts, I do”.  Girl ignroes Dad (of course) and goes in search of birth Dad.  Mexico in this movie is a Brietbart/ Alt-right Nightmare of unwashed hordes on our doorstep. Tragedy strikes, birth father is a slimeball, girl is kidnapped, cartels are evil, huaman trafficking, graphic violence, forced drug use, and rape.  Rambo goes in to save girl and murders his way through dozens of thugs, using anything at hand.  He finds girl, takes her home and she dies on the way back, from an overdose of drugs and all the torment.

John Rambo returns to Mexico and takes his vengeance.  It’s like an ‘80s slasher flick except the camp counselors aren’t innocent teenagers but harden cartel gang members and we’re expected to root for the Killer.  This draws the rest of the Cartel Soldiers back to John at his farm as act 3 opens.  Entering the United States through a Tunnel, kitting up like a Fortnite Group and heading out.

There is 10 solid minutes of Carnage filmed with the most skill and care that the film-makers, including Sylvester Stallone who has now a 44 year career of movie making under his belt.

John has a closing voice over monologue after killing the Last Bad Guy (TM). The last scene is John Rambo rocking on his front porch musing about how he will *ALWAYS* defend his country against all its enemies.  He Lives.  There’s an opening for a Sequel.

I had to shower.  its been continuing to bounce around in my head, which is why I’m writing it down here.  Rambo: Last Blood, in ANY OTHER UNIVERSE would be nothing more than an underground film passed around White Power rallies, “here’s your copy of the Turner Diaries, Hitlers speeches, and watch this bruthr”.  It seems like I might have went on for a long time when I started out that I couldn’t add details, I didn’t.  This was without details.

So, avoid this movie.  Just. Save yourself the stain in your brain and not watch this movie.

#movie #the80s