You’ve really got to hand it to Sylvester Stallone, for he somehow managed to beat all the odds and catch lightening in a bottle, not just one, but twice. Rocky Balboa was an incredible surprise, a touching and poignant film that revitalized a franchise left dead on the road for nearly 20 years. Theoretically though, older Rambo should have been more of a gimme than an older Rocky; my wide experience on the subject says that it’s easier to kill a bad guy with a machine gun than it is to pummel him in 10 rounds in a boxing ring. However, it seems that the opposite is true. Rambo’s probably better than you’d think, but it’s not as good as you’d hope.

In Rambo, we’re re-introduced to Vietnam vet John Rambo (Stallone) who’s making a meagre living as a river boat skipper in Thailand, catching snakes and ferrying passengers. He’s approached by two leaders of a Christian missionary group (Paul Schulze and Julie Benz), to take them up the Salween River into Burma to help refugees caught in the civil war there. Though reluctant, Rambo agrees and delivers the missionaries to a Burmese village where shortly there after they’re taken prisoner by sadistic army Major Pa Tee Tint (Maung Maung Khin). Rambo is then approached again to lead a group of mercenaries up river on a rescue mission, forcing him to face the demons of his past and to accept the belief that war is in his blood. “Die for nothing, live for something.”

Rambo is a perfectly serviceable action picture, but it is also quite flawed as you have to sit through nearly an hour of preamble before the killing really begins. A calm and considered look at a man past his prime may have worked fine for Rocky, but the Rambo films never held any presumption about being anything more than an exercise in blood and guts action. And again, it takes us a while to get that stuff so in the meantime you can see the Christian missionaries in action, watch the brutality of Tint’s forces and get to know the mercs assembled and ferried by Rambo up river to save the day.

There’s a lot going on as you may have observed so far, so it should come as no surprise then that there are times that Rambo is barely a part of his own movie. I get why we spend so much time with the missionaries, they’re the humanity card, the people just out to do good for good’s sake to remind Rambo there’s more to life than being the lone wolf/soul survivor.

But why, oh why include those heinously annoying mercs Sly? They’re just taken out of the military man stereotype casting book anyway. We’ve got the loud mouth Brit, the well-spoken educated guy, the token Asian, the hard-working Hispanic and a few faceless, nameless drones who can be slaughtered first in the pecking order. Not a single one of these guys contributed anything worthwhile to the action, both implicit and explicit and they sap valuable screen time from the main man just so that the disagreeable cocky snot can make some forward thinking “observations” about the nature of life at the bottom end of commerce, as in making money off human misery and the few “idiots” that try to solve it.

But if there’s one thing you can say about Rambo, when the action is on, it doesn’t wuss out. The big complaint levelled against Live Free and Die Hard was that it was downgraded to PG-13 from the series’ R-rated origins. The logic was multi-fold; obviously PG-13 can cast a wider net of ticket-holders, the younger of whom have grown up watching Die Hard and Rambo on video at home, where there’s no age related viewing restrictions, while mom and dad are away. Whether there was any discussion of a watered down Rambo, I don’t know because it doesn’t show on screen. This is as hardcore as it gets and by that I think that the real Rambo fans are going to dig this a lot.

Me, I was never a huge Rambo-phile, but I can appreciate an honest effort and good work if I see it. Rambo is well-executed and well in keeping with Stallone’s thematic approach to his famous properties: tired, old men with one last, great fight in them; old tigers near the end as it were. Rambo is careful crafted with dedication, but I think that another pass at the script probably would have shored it up enough to make it truly memorable. Still, a valiant effort and hopefully Stallone can ply his craft to something new.