Pure Rubbish, Juvenile Greaser Trash as Mainstream

Rating: 1/10 (7 September 2010)

Stallone, like his Rambo character, has come full circle in his life and showed himself to be at heart an ignorant greaser punk still in junior high. Here is a great example: his gang of mercenaries, when they aren't flying around the world killing for fun & profit, they hang around some grungy tattoo parlor/garage where they sport their Harleys and old 50s & 60s hot rods while getting more moronic body graffiti etched onto their bulked out torsos. There they get a chance to spout their grade school locker room wisdom & bond. Not that Rambo was a work of art, but at least that character had some wounded noble savage quality to him that made him more bearable than the total cardboard murder machine he played in this one. Also, the latest Rambo movie, while offering up the extreme violence & usual gory savagery that Stallone helped make mainstream years ago, at least helped expose the world to the plight of the Kachins in Burma, as opposed to this excuse for gore and violence.
I still can't figure out the plot of this movie, something about being set up in some Latin America banana republic, shot in Brazil for "authenticity". How or why seems unimportant but there is this not so bad stereotyped banana republic dictator who is a pawn of a stereotyped CIA/mercenary type played by Eric Roberts. The poor script tried to show that the bad stereotyped banana republic dictator wasn't so bad, just a tool of the always bad CIA man. But in the end that wasn't very apparent either.
But here is a revealing scene. When Rocky and Jason go there to do some re-con and meet some femme fatale contact, the stereotyped banana republic dictator's daughter, they are taken prisoner then do some very savage knife and gun fighting to get free. There is an obligatory chase scene through the stereotype Latin American town to the pier where their seaplane is tied up. The femme fatale refuses to board the plane to escape but our two boys do. When they fly off there are about 50 soldiers on the pier shooting at the plane taking off, I guess in revenge for the duo savaging about 20 of them earlier. The plane gets aloft, then Jason climbs into the nose of the plane while Rambo pilots it and he comes out halfway out this little hatch in the top of the nose exposed to the air blast. Then we see that there is 4 machine guns in the plane's nose so Rocky banks the plane so Jason can fire the guns & mow the soldiers on the pier down, almost winging Rambo's new love, the femme fatale. Duh, like wouldn't it make more sense to hook those guns up to a remote trigger and have a sight inboard so the pilot can aim & fire while flying, just like they have been doing since late World War 1? They finish that scene off by spraying the dock with the plane's fuel and burning up the survivors when they fire the all purpose flare gun at the dock.
it just goes on and on, mass violence where none of his team even gets winged. Oh one more scene, one of his team, played by equally brain dead Lundgren is a rebel and goes over to the other side. He tries to off Rambo in Rambo's 50's hot rod pick up truck but his 9mm bullets from his submachine gun won't penetrate the armored windows or body. You'd think Dolph, since he hung out there in the tattoo parlor/garage too, would know that his boss's truck was armored plated, so use a better gun.
There is no redeeming value at all to this flick, even the cameo by Willis & Arnold is all talk in a church. It is just a lot of ultra violent gore and mayhem for overgrown boys with nothing intelligible in between. It is an utterly comic book movie because the source material is, guess, a comic book!