Pun Salad

In yet another unwarranted reminder of my advanced age, it turns out to have been 20 years since the previous appearance of John Rambo, as he rescued Colonel Trautman in Afghanistan, and coincidentally destroyed a whole bunch of Commies in helping out the Mujahedeen eject the Soviets.

Now he's somehow retired to Thailand, where he ekes out an honest living catching snakes, blacksmithing, and mumbling. But, as probably even major-party presidential candidates know, Thailand is next to Burma and very bad things go on there. Rambo is persuaded to insert some peace-loving Christian missionaries into the country. When things, inevitably, go very bad for them, he's on the hook to go back and get them out.

This is not family fare. Lots of death and destruction, and perhaps more than you want to know about what happens to people hit by .50 caliber machine gun fire or who find themselves too close to a Claymore mine.

If you've seen Rambos II and III, you can pretty much predict how things play out here. To repeat: it's very, very, graphically violent, and some of the victims are children. I'm hardly a prude about movie violence; and I suppose there's an argument that if you want to be honest about depicting the nature of evil, you have to be unflinchingly honest. Still, I found it disturbing.