Movie Review: Rambo

You only have to go back two years to reach a point when Sylvester Stallone's career looked well and truly over. It had been a good decade since his last hit movie, and people were openly laughing at the idea of Sly getting back in the ring for yet another Rocky movie.

Of course, Rocky Balboa turned out to be a critical and a commercial success, so it was inevitable that Stallone's other great action hero – John Rambo – would make his own comeback.

Confusingly, this fourth movie in the series that started with First Blood is simply called Rambo, but that’s the most unusual thing about it. Elsewhere, it's business as usual as our meat-headed killing machine takes on another bunch of interchangeable democracy-hating foreign scum. In this case, it's the Burmese military.

Whether by design or accident, Stallone has fashioned a film that pretty much ignores the last last two decades of filmmaking. While Rocky Balboa was a handsomely mounted film that demonstrated Sly's underrated skills as a director, Rambo actually manages to look cheaper than all of its predecessors – in fact, at times it resembles a straight-to-video knock off of the first movie.

Given he only has about ten lines of dialogue, it's hardly an excuse that Stallone was too busy in front of the camera, but the first 40 minutes really plod along, as our hero ferries a bunch of idiotic missionaries up the river into Burma, only for them to get captured about ten minutes later.

Luckily, if there's one thing Stallone knows, it's what the fans want. And what they want is bullets, explosions, decapitations, dismemberment and a bloke getting a crossbow bolt through the face. Sly saves all this and more for the ludicrously violent final 20 minutes, when Rambo and his mercenary chums prove that the American style of killing is much better than the sissy Asian way.

Rambo is what it is – shallow, moronic and cruddy-looking – but for all those looking forward a unashamedly bloodthirsty return to an earlier, less-sophisticated form of action filmmaking, it's also strangely satisfying.