Rambo, The Fight Continues, Blu-ray (2008)
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze, Matthew Marsden, Graham McTavish
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Studio: Lionsgate
Video: 2.40:1 anamorphic/enhanced for 16:9, 1080p HD
Audio: DTS HD Master Audio 7.1, French DD 5.1
Extras: Deleted Scenes, Commentary, Featurettes, Trailers
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Length: 91 minutes
Rating: ***1/2
While Sylvester Stallone definitely runs the risk of lampooning himself with another return to the Rambo franchise, I really have to admit that I didn’t find Rambo, The Fight Continues nearly as bad a watch as I’d anticipated. The film opens with scenes of extreme violence in Burma’s (now known as Myanmar) civil war. As in Rambo III, John Rambo is still living in Thailand, however now he makes a living as a small boat captain and exotic snake wrangler. He’s approached by Christian missionaries who want him to take them upriver to a settlement where their church is doing relief work. While Rambo is always hesitant to become involved in any situations that might lead to violence, he accepts, and despite a perilous journey, delivers the missionaries to their encampment in Burma. He then returns home, although with a sense of dread for the wellbeing of the missionaries. Predictably, the missionaries fall into the hands of the bad guys, and Rambo is approached to transport a group of mercenaries who are contracted to hopefully extract any survivors from the Burmese bad guys. His sense of duty still intact, Rambo steps up to provide some much-needed assistance and expertise to the mercenaries.
Maybe I’m just an absolute simpleton, but I have no problem suspending disbelief and wholly buying into the notion that Rambo is really just a deeply conflicted, complex psychological character who really does want to lead a peaceful existence. I feel that Sylvester Stallone really sells this point of view well in the last two “Rambo” movies (especially this one), and much more so than in the original couple of entries in the franchise, where he seemed much more like a one-man army. He only resorts to violence if absolutely necessary. That said, there is an extreme amount of violence in this film. However, most of the violence is inflicted by the Burmese bad guys on the poor civilian population. Most of those scenes have a very stylized visual appearance, and though the violence is extreme, it’s never really what I’d call gratuitous. Yes, there’s buckets of blood, limbs are hacked and just about every conceivable human rights violation occurs, but the almost watercolor-like film effects used during these sequences helped minimize a lot of the “cringe-factor” I associate with so many scenes of violence in modern filmmaking.
In technical terms, this film is the crowning achievement of the entire Rambo franchise. While the image has a very stylized and heavily color-saturated appearance throughout, it is, nonetheless, really impressive to look at and incredibly detailed. Contrast is superb throughout the presentation. And the DTS HD Master Audio soundtrack is nothing short of superb, and offers the kind of envelopment and surround-sound involvement sorely lacking from the earlier three films. This two-disc set is packed with an abundance of extra material, which should engage the Rambo-philes out there endlessly, and also includes Blu-ray Profile 1.1 features (for those with capable equipment), such as a picture-in-picture commentary with Stallone that features extensive behind the scenes footage. Also included is a digital copy of the movie, which can be loaded on your PC, Mac or enabled portable device. While definitely not for all tastes (only the excessive violence kept me from giving this film four stars), the movie offers an impressive package of home-theater spectacle and generous extras. Highly recommended.
— Tom Gibbs
