| | | The Fight Continues.
Features: DVD, Widescreen, English, Subtitled, Spanish, Dolby Digital (5.1)
The next chapter finds Rambo recruited by missionaries to protect them during a humanitarian aid effort on behalf of the persecuted Karen people of Burma. After the missionaries are taken prisoner by Burmese soldiers, Rambo gets a second impossible job: rescue the missionaries in the midst of a civil war.
"The best Rambo yet! Rambo is back with a vengeance!" BloodyDisgusting.com
"More intense than ever!" Craig Outhier, Orange County Register
"The most intense Rambo yet!" Fred Topel, CanMag.com
"Stallone proves once again why he is a legend!" JoBlo.com
"...a brutal, insanely excessive successor to grindhouse pictures of yore." Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide
"Shockingly entertaining!" Mark Rahner, Seattle Times
"A straight-ahead exercise in brutality." Pete Vonder Haar, Film Threat
Editor's Note
Coming off the success of 2006's ROCKY BALBOA, action star Sylvester Stallone revisits yet another of his iconic characters from the 1980s, John Rambo. Now living like a hermit and wrangling rattlesnakes in Thailand, Rambo is drawn back into the action by a group of do-gooder missionaries who want the taciturn, possibly psychotic, Vietnam vet to ferry them upriver into Burma. Though he initially proves reluctant--"Burma's a warzone"--Sarah, played by Julie Benz, convinces Rambo of their noble intentions. Doesn't he want to relieve suffering and stop ethnic cleansing? But when the group of idealists gets captured by the Burmese army, it's up to Rambo and a team of multinational mercenaries to save the day. What follows is an exhilarating, hypnotic explosion of violence as Rambo fights genocide with genocide, turning men into hamburger meat with high-powered machine guns, well-placed bombs, razor-sharp machetes, and, the most deadly weapon of all, his bare hands. Rather than trying to update the character, RAMBO succeeds largely by returning to the Reagan-era values that made its hero so great in the first place: his pathological obsession with laying waste to emphatically evil characters in increasingly grotesque ways. Indeed, the film's action sequences recall the opening of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, as bodies turn to reddish slush, entrails pour forth with abandon, and limbs are severed with bewildering frequency. Stallone (who also wrote and directed) perfectly embodies his role, a muscular, mumbling killing machine that recalls, in all the best of ways, Karloff's Frankenstein monster. While some may take issue with RAMBO's brutal onscreen violence, the film has an undeniably cathartic impact that has less to do with realistic storytelling, and more to do with the power of myth.
| Features | Audio: English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound | | Includes A Digital Copy Of The Film! | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, Spanish |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Lions Gate |
| Release Date: 5/27/2008 |
| Running Time: 93 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 2008 | | Catalog ID: 23294 | | UPC: 00031398232940 | | Number of Discs: 2 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English [CC], English | | Available Subtitles: Spanish | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Widescreen 2.35:1 |
| Cast & Crew
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| | Professional Reviews | Los Angeles Times
"As he did in 2006's ROCKY BALBOA, the 60-year-old star dons the persona like a comfy old suit..." 01/25/2008Reel.com 7 of 10
Make no mistake about it, this is the real "gorno"...Things blow up in Rambo. They blow up real good. Stallone has taken the forgotten skill of human detonation and turned it into an art form...Rambo is a pleasure of the guiltiest, most gratuitous kind. It's the typical heroes-and-villains formula on human growth hormones, laced with crack. It satisfies one's instinctual Neanderthal bloodlust and busts as many taboos as it embraces. This is a movie that blows big holes in kids during commonplace village raids, where angry goon squads lop limbs off the elderly and rape the ladies, both before and after they're dead...And that's exactly what this mindless action movie does. It's like XXX porn substituting evisceration for fornication. None of the supporting characters are memorable, and the plot is merely a setup followed by splatterific payoff. But when you're dealing with a one-dimensional death machine like Rambo, disemboweling, dismemberment, and decapitation are all the depth that's required. Longtime fans may wonder where the tired solider with the wounded soul from First Blood went. Just like the actor playing him, our hero no longer looks or acts like his predecessor. Oddly enough, as long as he covers his tracks in the entrails of his enemies, we really couldn't care less. - Bill Gibron
San Francisco Chronicle 5 of 10
By now, Sylvester Stallone seems to have accepted that his two lasting contributions to civilization are Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, and his new film "Rambo" is a product of that acceptance. It's a straight-ahead action film that makes the first 30 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan" look like a debutante ball. It's 90 minutes of flying, dismembered limbs and explosions of blood, but give the man credit. Stallone can do action. If you want action and nothing but, here it is...Does this mean Stallone is stuck? No, but his public probably is, and Stallone knows it. In "Rambo," he does his job, providing himself with good one-liners, pithy aphorisms ("Live for nothing, or die for something!") and opportunities for him to kill literally hundreds of people in a matter of minutes. He goes out and gives us a "Rambo" movie...The "Rambo" movies are wedded to the action formula, which means that they have to end in victory, and Stallone is too smart to mess with that. Actually, he shouldn't mess with that. But just once, after the bodies are buried - or better yet, left to rot - I'd like to see Stallone explicitly pursue and acknowledge his implicit message with these films, that it's all compromise, that it's all awful, and that life is such a complete waste of time that you really might as well blow $10 on the new "Rambo" movie. - Mick LaSalle
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