According to the Internet Movie Database, the film averages 2.59 killings per minute. The brooding, disaffected anti-hero of First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985) and Rambo 3 (1988) is now in his 60s, and less prone to leaping about the landscape, but he can still mow down the bad guys with the best of them. As the movie’s tag line goes, ‘old heroes never die, they just reload’. The cinematic result is an almost cosmic battle between good and evil, as the invincible US Special Forces soldier John Rambo once again comes out of retirement to rescue a group of Christian missionaries held captive by the Burmese army. SOF nominated the 60 year-old civil war between Burma’s central government and the ethnic Karens, most of who live along the Thai-Burma border. When deciding where to set his movie, Stallone reportedly asked both the UN and Soldier of Fortune (SOF) magazine to name the world’s worst current war zones.
Yet, its dubious entertainment value aside, this movie in fact has the potential to do Burma’s opposition movement considerable harm.
Sylvester Stallone has claimed that his movie, Rambo 4, released internationally in February and available to Australians on DVD next month, has a serious purpose - to draw attention to the Burmese government’s long record of human rights abuses and to mobilize action against the military regime. Guest blogger: Andrew Selth, Research Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and author of Populism, Politics and Propaganda: Burma and the Movies