I know its been a couple of months since Rambo IV came out and I really should have reviewed it then, but I didn’t get a chance and so here we are now – you’re stuck with another one of my delayed reviews (but hopefully informative in a way that others are not).

You know how the 80s films like Terminator and Robocop were really violent in a visceral but a really fun way. Well, this film is like that – back to the old school, badass days when there was no CGI. In this film, Rambo kills everyone; ever heard of anti-aircraft guns, the ones that come with bullets the size of a cucumber? Well Rambo shoots down people with it, decapitates them more like it. But unfortunately you never really get to hear the main theme tune in its full glory as you did in the previous Rambos, nor are their enough scenes similar to the eye-opening ‘in the mud scene’ from Rambo II, at east not enough for my liking. But its all still badass and for me, really nostalgic.

But here’s my problem with this film – if this film isn’t a display of Western chauvinism, then I don’t know what is. Rambo goes this time to Burma and he takes a bunch of rag-tag Western mercenaries who have been hired by some American church to rescue its missionaries who are being held captive by the Burmese military junta. Of all the bad things that are going on in Burma, with the Buddhist monks of the country taking to the streets and risking their lives to protest against the military rule, Stallone chooses to tell his supposedly “serious political story” from the perspective of a bunch of missionaries from some American church who are rich enough to hire mercenaries. And the only people who Rambo saves are the Americans but none of the Burmese people, not the dancing girls who were getting molested by the “bad guys”, not even the young boy who was being raped – only the Americans get saved.

But you know what, maybe I’m being too harsh. Ever since First Blood, Rambo films have always been a right expression of American jingoism and political thought –in Part II he goes and rewrites history by winning his mini-Vietnam, in Part III (obviously made before 9/11 when America was still supplying Arms to the Taliban) he helps the “heroic mujahideen” of Afghanistan in their fight for “freedom” against the Russian. I should have expected the same thing from this and hey, at least I get to see an old school blood and guts film that you don’t see anymore. And at the end of it all Rambo gets to back to America to be with “his people”, ’cus who wants to live with these savages from Asia right?