A tribute to Rambo: The Greatest War film ever made

If war films ever needed a savior, then they got one in Sylvester Stallone.

On second thought, they needed one, and being awesome, Stallone delivered the goods. Years after his Academy Award-nominated Rambo: First Blood Part II literally redefined the genre and saved it from the self-indulgent drudgery of the Longest Day and the mind-blowing boredom of Apocalypse Now, Stallone returned once again to save it from abject failure. You know, the Full Metal Jacket and Jarhead kind of abject failure? Yep, that kind of failure.

Both fail because we real men don't watch war films to get an in-depth look into the life of your average foot soldier. Who does? Moreover, who cares? A three-hour long barracks scene may be "realistic", but so is photosynthesis — and last I checked, no one pays to watch plants grow. Well, that's what Full Metal Jacket and Jarhead really are: watching a bunch of plants grow, if they fed on hackneyed juvenile masturbation innuendos and contained much more recycled bullshit. Real men watch war films to see people getting blown apart and eviscerated, which is where Stallone's latest installment of Rambo never fails to rub one out disappoints.

No pseudo-frat boy bullshit. Rambo is serious business.

The eponymous hero has lived a fairly isolated lifestyle ever since destroying what was left of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, catching snakes and operating a sampan in a podunk tourist attraction near the Burmese border. He doesn't cross it because a lot of people are being killed on the other side, and if he did, he'd kill everyone anyway and there'd be no movie, so we can assume right off the bat that he's probably busy. Anyhow, he always passes by an unexploded World War II bomb during his daily travels, but it's not just any unexploded World War II bomb: It's an allegory to the raging menace within him who's hell bent on satiating his perpetual bloodthirst. As luck would have it, he'd get his chance.

The Knife

He ferries a group of missionaries to nearby war-torn Burma, where they're later captured in one of many genocidal raids by the Burmese military, but the joke's on the Burmese: they didn't know they were up against Rambo. The former green beret believes that he can atone for having killed countless numbers of people by rescuing the missionaries and, well, killing even more people in the process, but his fists can only take him so far, which means that he needs a knife...and not just any ordinary killing knife. He crafts one of unimaginable destructible capability (in other words: a tool) fit for the merciless killer within him whom we all know and love. If you could summarize this paragraph, he heads into battle with a renewed determination, a new knife, and biceps the size of dinosaurs. You can never forget the biceps. Or the part where he kills countless numbers of people. Mmmm. . . me likes.

The part you fast forwarded to

After saving a group of Karen refugees with his mad bow skills, Rambo and a group of ragtag mercenaries spring whatever's left of the missionaries loose, then all of them haul ass back to the boat. Unbeknownst to them, they're being chased by hundreds of Burmese soldiers, so Rambo splits off from the group and leads a good chunk of his pursuers to an explosive encounter with . . . you guessed it: the unexploded World War II bomb. (Correction: formerly unexploded). Whoever thought that the realization of symbolism could be so destructively awesome? Rambo did.

The final act consists of him mowing down a bunch of dudes with a machine gun for a good ten minutes. I kid you not. It's just as badass as it sounds, and it's just as representative of the thrill ride that Rambo has to offer that I happened to spoil.

Of course, you should see it anyway unless you like that bullshit Jarhead. (At which point, you'd be shallow and have no business reading this.)

An homage to Cobra from a humbled filmgoer

Stop the presses because I just had the privilege of seeing Cobra, the greatest movie ever made. What can I say? It's a two hour merry-go-round of vintage asskicking in which you really can't tell where the bumcrushing stops and everything else begins. It's almost like someone asked me to bed three hot naked lesbians simultaneously with a side of honey barbeque wings, a lager, and a nearby boombox set to Astrud Gilberto's Girl from Ipanema; I agreed; and I only had to give two hours of my non-sexual time in return (meaning 1/12th of the pie graph). Unfortunately, I find myself doing the thirty billionth-to-next best thing, oggling a remotely kinda sorta hot Brigitte Nielsen — meaning when she didn't look like a dude — which invariably places this in about the mid-to-late 80's, a bygone era when directors and producers never went wrong with action clichés, cheesy catchphrases, and Sylvester Stallone in lead roles. Of course, it goes by implication that a film with all three has to be good, which Cobra effectively is. Damn good.

The Protagonist(s)

Stallone plays Marion "Cobra" Cobretti, a laconic and gritty undercover detective who uses extremely violent and lawfully reckless measures (ie. The way God intended) to bring criminals to justice. Imagine that you just crashed into Vin Diesel's truck while parallel parking. Good, now imagine that you did it deliberately, except that he's driving a low rider, not Vin Diesel, and three Mexican guys. Yep, Marion Cobretti does just that, and he has enough audacity left over to remove a cigarette from one guy's mouth and lecture him on the fine rules of public parking etiquette thereafter. Cobretti doesn't waste any time in fulfilling one of his implicit duties as a community organizer. (I'll be damned if I know what that is, but it probably involves kicking ass and taking names. . . if only verbally.)

The Antagonists

Behold. . . the face of pure evil!

Not much is known about the antagonists, and quite frankly, there doesn't need to be. The discrepant banging of axes and the subtle usage of quasi-dance club lighting tells you that these ruffians are purely malevolent, all serious business, and zero percent auditorily adroit. The movie doesn't waste three hours explaining their morally equivalent back stories and having you shed tears over their abject socioeconomic conditions (they live in a sewer) or how they got their disfiguring scars through frequent parental abuse (heavy metal and alcohol explains a lot of things). They're simply a heavily-armed group of ignominious new world cultists who love robbing supermarkets, going on random killing sprees, and clanking axes together. Need I say more?

The Beginning

The movie introduces Cobretti as he races to the scene of an escalating hostage situation at (sigh) a supermarket, and things obviously aren't going well. There, a shotgun-wielding homocidal maniac, one who's not content enough to grab a bludgeoning weapon and jam, doles out painful samples of hot lead with deadly results, sparing neither innocuous beer cans nor virgin fresh produce in his violent protest against the deterioration of family-based Mom and Pop corner stores. . . or something, but organized commerce needn't fear for long! The everpresent defender of chain groceries and the bane of small business advocates arrives, but not in time to save a helpless young man from getting double buckshot to the thorax. Oh! Rejected!

The Showdown

Every film has a definitive, signature moment. The Godfather has the baptism scene, Heat has the bank shootout, and Braveheart that one part where an English guy gets stabbed in the face. Cobra has about a billion of these scenes, but none more poignant and representative of its disconcerting tone than Cobretti's harrowing face to face encounter with the aforementioned suspect after being shot at for a few minutes. Is his immediate nemesis a misguided crusader? An advocate for a bygone cause? Who cares? Either way, someone dies and the entire scene once again proves that no genuine 80's action flick would be complete without gratuitous violence and witty, memorable one-liners. Enjoy!

Now that's what I call a cold cut with the trimmings. Ho, ho, ho!

And Everything Else


The next hundred and ten minutes brilliantly keep pace with the first ten as the aforesaid cult led by its enigmatic leader, the Night Slasher, brings Los Angeles to its knees with another chain of loosely-connected murders, to which Brigitte Nielsen, whose depiction of a glorified and apparently emotionally devoid model is a somewhat fair imitation of life (unless she were really being hunted, at which point she'd be Rebecca Schaeffer and just as dead), becomes an unwilling witness and an eventual target herself. She later hooks up with Stallone and his wise-cracking cop buddy (Reni Santoni), eloping with the former into the countryside until the cult finds out and all hell breaks loose in a climactic and awesomely pointless (and pointlessly awesome) automobile chase through the wine country. Yes, and you needn't ask if bullets and limbs start flying. It should be pretty obvious by now.

Fin

Cobra was released when unmistakably violent films advocating harsher penalties for crimes — the Death Wish and Dirty Harry franchises — were a dime a dozen and nevertheless downright awesome in every sense of the word. Any movie afiocionado will acknowledge the greatness of this mid 80's classic, in which Stallone takes asskicking, kicking ass, and everything in between to an entirely new level in one of the finest action films in a golden age for fine action films. I, being the other arbiter of said activity, don't deal with any afiocionados who don't. . .

Ten of the greatest films that western civilization has ever made

And I emphasize Western Civilization because nobody gives a shit about the east. Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. Deductively, here are ten films that everybody gives a shit about — and if they don't, then they eventually will under a Bryan regime's strict emphasis on classic filmmaking:

1. Flash Gordon (1980) Sam J. Jones plays the eponymous star Quarterback of the New York Jets who has only 24 hours to save the Earth from a bunch of invading aliens. Holy shit! Unfortunately, if salvation ever came down to Brett Favre, then we'd be effectively screwed. On second thought, let's keep it at just plain screwed; Favre is never effective.

2. Missing in Action 2: The Beginning (1985) Story of one man's struggle in a hellish Vietnamese POW camp as he withstands faux executions, opium overdoses, and vicious hits to the abdomen only to wreak holy hell on his captors with the megafart.

Not to be confused with the harrowing captivity of the late Admiral James Stockdale, with whom Braddock's experience bears a remarkable resemblance. . . or so I've read.

3. Rambo 3 (1988) Ah, the 80's. Reagan was in charge, so were the 49ers, and the Soviets were bombing the hell out of Afghanistan — and it's up to Rambo to kick the crap out of those vulgar commies for killing Apollo Creed. He's coaxed out of his rugged life in a fairly isolated Buddhist monastery, one of his pacifist preoccupations when he's not too busy cracking some backalley brawler skull for money, to rescue his former commanding officer and bring an end to the Cold War in the most violent and considerably entertaining way possible. You should not be surprised that more people die in this film than in the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars combined.

4. Escape from New York (1981) Has Kurt Russell, and anything that has him in the lead role is bound to be good. Basically, he plays a disenchanted war veteran who goes into a post-apocalyptic New York to waste criminals and save the President until he finds out that the President is sort of a criminal himself. Contemporary movies can learn from such plot coherency.

5. Blackhawk Down (2002) Requires some fast forwarding — though not Jarhead-like fast forwarding, which would entail fast-forwarding through the entire thing because all of it sucked — through the shitty barracks scene, but you'll get no argument from me otherwise; lots of people being killed, fried, maimed, and every other -ed in the book to keep your bloodthirst quenched until rapture.

6. The Punisher (1989) Dolph Lundgren fits the role of Frank Castle because his limited repertoire of facial expressions, in addition to his sheer badassery in real life, complements his virtuosic potrayal of Marvel's emotionally devoid, gun-toting vigilante. A small step for man, but an even larger one for method acting in general. What's method acting? Hell if I know, but I do know that Ivan Drago kicks ass and takes names in this late 80's action classic.

7. Death Wish 3 (1985) Score another one for Golan-Globus productions. In the most captivating performance of his illustrious career, Charles Bronson returns to a London posing for New York City to find his war buddy dead and another (Martin Balsam) under constant threat by a gang of lollygagging hoodlums. Fortunately, Bronson takes the proactive approach by wasting every single one of them on the spot. And yes, I mean every single one; he even kills them twice because, hey, the only good thug is a dead thug, but only when you've made sure. As you can see, veteran character actor Ed Lauter later joins the fray by taking out that little wuss from Bill and Ted's Ultimate Adventure. (I know. A shame that he couldn't take out the other.)

Man, Death Wish 3 had everything — except a vampire, but it still had everything because vampires don't count.

8. Zulu (1964) I don't know why everyone likes Crash. Fuck Crash. Who needs to confront glaring social issues when you're surrounded by thousands of bloodthirsty Zulu warriors who just devoured a legion of your army buddies? Nobody. Fortunately, the British did the next best thing and shot their way out, despite being surrounded 30:1 at the depicted Battle of Rorke's Drift, thus handing the Zulu a dreaded case of the blue balls in the process. From what I gather, the Zulu's collective nervous system never recovered. An absolutely great film from start to finish.

9. Road House (1988) Excuse my candor, but this movie really caught on because its protagonist (Patrick Swayze), like me, is a professional ass-kicker by trade. When he's hired to lay down the law in the eponymous setting, awesomeness invariably ensues. I give it five stars and fifty billion more for the sheer manliness and an important supporting role by Sam Elliott, who plays Swayze's tough, gritty bouncing mentor.

10. We Were Soldiers (2003) Sam Elliott strikes again, diversifying his acting portfolio by playing the Seventh Cavalry's tough, gritty Sergeant Major.

Elliott's brilliant performance notwithstanding, keen usage of the fast-forwarding button and a few lengthy bathroom breaks help here. We Were Soldiers is a good war film has more than enough killing on both sides to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty and contrived monster, whom I refer to as Weweresoldor, but not enough to reconcile his urges with the shitty domestic scenes. I mean, you can't help but think that it could've used Count Vlad somewhere to wean you through and at least keep everything in line with the action. It's like you wait for it for awhile, but like the kid who wanted an Xbox 360 for Christmas, you never get it. Weak.

I can do that, too.

Says a recent Notre Dame commit:

“I’m the best there is, best there was, best there ever will be,” the soon-to-be Notre Dame defensive tackle said. “It doesn’t matter what game. NCAA Football 09? I’m one of the top five in the nation. Give me any team, and I can make them good. I can make Notre Dame the national champion in that game.”

No shit. It's called "Edit Rosters," Sherlock. You know who else I can easily turn into a national title contender? Syracuse. Of course, it's not like I'd need to anyway. They beat Notre Dame, and Notre Dame's like the second best team in the country — with everyone else tied for first, of course.