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Rambo
Written and Directed by: Sylvester Stallone
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Matthew Marsden, Graham McTavish, Rey Gallegos, Jake La Botz, Tim Kang, Paul Schulze
Running time: 95 minutes
Sylvester Stallone may be in his sixties, but he hasn't lost a step in terms of writing, directing or performing in all-out,
action features. He proved that a year ago with Rocky VI, which was essentially a remake of his Academy Award-winning Best
Picture of 1976. Now he proves it again in Rambo (4), a revival of the charismatic character he first introduced over a quarter
century ago. John Rambo is a Vietnam War hero from Texas whose post-traumatic stress disorder was compounded by the fact that
veterans of his era weren't welcomed back to America with open arms.
As this latest instalment opens, we find him living alone along the Salween River in northern Thailand. He seems finally
to have made peace with his tortured past, dividing his time between fishing on his longboat and catching poisonous snakes
in the jungle, despite the fact that a decades-old civil war is raging just across the border in Burma. Rambo it seems has
no interest in venturing anywhere near the conflict.
Everything changes however, the day missionaries from the Christ Church of Colorado arrive, announcing their plan to bring
Bibles and much needed medical supplies to the victims of the ongoing ethnic cleansing. Having heard that Rambo is the best
river guide in the region, these naïve volunteers ask him for a ride into Burma aboard his ramshackle longboat. After repeatedly
telling them in no uncertain terms to "Go home!" and warning that "You're not going to change anything!",
he succumbs to the womanly wiles of Sarah Miller (Julie Benz) who wraps him around her little finger and gets him to ferry
them into the war zone against his better judgement.
So, it's no surprise a couple of weeks later, when a panicky Pastor Marks (Ken Howard) shows up saying that his parishioners
have been taken hostage by the Burmese army and that the U.S. embassy has refused to get involved. Fuelled by a fear that
some harm might come to Sarah, Rambo reluctantly picks up a gun again and leads a cliché-ridden team of mercenaries on a bloody,
death-defying rescue mission.
At this juncture, the film slips into the familiar, testosterone-fuelled fare associated with the high body-count Rambo
franchise, replete with hand-to-hand combat, automatic weapons, and visually-captivating pyrotechnics. Critical to appreciating
this revenge-driven flick fully is the dehumanisation of the Asian bad guys into disposable sadists and rapists lusting over
the only hot blonde to be found for miles around.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this newest Rambo is just how unrepentantly violent it is. In this regard, it
has more in common with First Blood than the two earlier sequels (which portrayed their violence in an almost cartoon-like
fashion which was in vogue during the 1980s). The violence on display here however is extremely brutal and Stallone's camera
never flinches from capturing atrocity. Limbs fly, heads roll, children die, people are blown up and blasted by an obscene
number of bullets. The reason seems to be that Stallone wants to drive home the point that violent things like these are happening
around the globe every minute of every day. He doesn't pull any punches. Instead, he drops them right in your face and forces
you to confront them. On the other hand, there's no denying that Stallone also understands that audiences coming back to the
Rambo franchise or experiencing it for the first time have a certain set of expectations. We live in a more violent world
than we did when Rambo was in his heyday and for this film to have any kind of impact, the violence is almost necessary.
Stallone demonstrates a real knack for constructing action set-pieces and coming up with ever-more creative ways to turn
human actors into fine red mist and those with lesser constitutions may find the gore hard to stomach. Of course, the squeamish
types aren't likely to be seeing a Rambo film in the first place. Stallone clearly knows what his audience expects and works
hard to surpass those expectations by crafting a film that is almost beautiful in its brutality. What makes it tolerable is
that the men Rambo slaughters with such reckless abandon are so evil that you're likely to find yourself gleefully cheering
whenever their number comes up.
Stallone is clearly the driving force of the film, and he slips back into the character of John Rambo just as easily as
he recreated Rocky Balboa. Even though Stallone is knocking on a bit, his Rambo is no less intense and frightening than he
was back in the '80s. Stallone, even at this advanced age, is still a bigger action icon than anyone clamouring for the mantle
today. He'd thump Jason Bourne and any Vin Diesel character without even breaking a sweat. In some ways, this older Rambo
is actually cooler, the character has grown pretty weary and cynical in the years since his last outing, and Stallone's hangdog
expression and mumbled platitudes make you identify with the character as a person and not just a professional killer.
All of this isn't to say that Rambo is an action classic, because it certainly is not. Some of the dialogue is unbearably
corny and the script never concerns itself with logic if it gets in the way of a good bloodbath. This is Rambo for a new generation
- bigger, more violent, and yet somehow slightly smarter too. It's not even remotely subtle in its examination of world conflict
or the situation in Burma, but that it even bothered to look at those issues (instead of taking the easy way out and setting
the movie in Iraq or some other Middle Eastern country) makes it smarter than the other films in the canon (First Blood excluded).
There Will Be Blood
Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciaran Hinds, Kevin J. O'Connor
Running Time: 2hrs 40min
By the time the boy lies moaning on the floor, spooned against a father who is helpless to soothe him, the earth has blasted
open, fire has whooshed up through an oil derrick and a dozen roustabouts, dwarfed by their handywork, have raced in all directions
across the stone covered Central California hilltop, trying to contain the immense forces they'd set loose. When at last they
can do no more than wait, some stand silhouetted before the tower of flame, marvelling as it raged against an indigo sky.
Others had watched from a distance, the glow flickering over their faces, while greasy black clouds spread into lingering
daylight to the west. After night fell, around the time the derrick toppled, the boss's assistant had asked if the boy was
all right. "No," the boss had calmly said of his son, "he's not," as he continued watching the fire. All
this, to a clattering soundtrack and still the gargantuan sequence wasn't over. A fresh day had to break, and wagons loaded
with dynamite shoved into the mouth of the fire, before Daniel Plainview could at last lie on the floor of his shack, to caress
and restrain his damaged son.
Grim and gleeful, mechanistic and demonic, this tremendous set piece stands out as the most elaborate segment in Paul
Thomas Anderson's stunning There Will Be Blood but is only one of the film's many great dramatic eruptions. All of them are
instantly recognisable as classic. Each is distinct in setting and style: the Wild West showdown, filmed in a panoramic sweep
beside a rising lake of oil; the faith-healing service, in which the camera tracks a preacher's dance back and forth through
his pine box of a church; the scene of Daniel Plainview's public humiliation, shot in steady, pitiless close-up beneath a
cross of sunlight; the final confrontation between Plainview and his son, executed as an intricate pattern of cross-cutting
within an office that's all carved mahogany and shadows. There's even a staggering climactic scene that rivals the big oil-strike
sequence for virtuosity and violence, despite being shot with just two actors within a basement bowling alley.
There have of course been many other films about the lawless West and the making of American fortunes. You've seen Charles
Foster Kane, self-isolated and half-mad, tearing up his Xanadu. But in the aptly titled There Will Be Blood, Anderson tells
the familiar story not as he's received it from earlier films or even from his putative source, Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel
Oil!, but as a kind of social realist vision. Utterly fluid yet coming at you in flashes, based on events of a century ago
yet intensely present, the film seems as tangible as its desert hills and steam-powered machines but as unfathomable as Daniel
Plainview: a rumbling abyss of a man, who will tell you he doesn't like to explain himself.
In this, as in other ways, he is true to the historic character of America's self-made men. As has been written of the
nineteenth century's industrial millionaires, "None had noticeable scruples or could afford to have in an economy and
an age where fraud, bribery, slander and if necessary guns were normal aspects of competition. All were hard men, and most
would have regarded the question whether they were honest as considerably less relevant to their affairs than the question
whether they were smart."
Though Plainview makes his great strike a little later on in 1911, he too is a hard man, who will stake a mining claim
even at the expense of dragging his smashed bones across a landscape of bleached rocks; a lying man, who despite his roughneck
past affects a gentleman's cooing, round-vowelled manner to tell "plainspoken" truths, which patently aren't; a
ruthlessly smart man, who knows of no graver insult than "fool" and is at his most dangerous when he finds he's
been played for one.
Where he breaks from type, a departure that makes all the difference to the film, is in his disgust at that cruellest
of hoodwinkers: the man of God. The old robber barons could abide the forms of religion when necessary, here dropping an endowment
into a strategically advantageous church, there nodding to a sermon that blessed the accumulation of capital. But as much
as Plainview aspires to hypocrisy, his one irrepressible, honest impulse is a physical revulsion toward the Almighty and His
spokespersons. Reality to Plainview comes down to mechanics, and mechanics in his experience always threatens to become a
chain of catastrophes: pulleys that malfunction at the worst moment, beams and hardware that fail to support enough weight,
heavy drill bits that slip loose and fall until stopped by somebody's skull. So in this universe of accident and calculation,
it must be one more damned trick of chance when Plainview comes snooping for oil in Little Boston, California, his boy H.W.
in tow, and winds up negotiating for mineral rights with smooth-faced Eli Sunday, a goat farmer's son who self appointedly
has founded the Church of the Third Revelation.
Sunday, too, is self-made in his way, having anointed himself the evangelist of a new gospel that apparently is still
coming in. That this young promoter bargains over the price of a lease doesn't much bother Plainview, who expects as much
in business and also expects to win. But the oilman rips himself away with barely concealed anger when Sunday tries to seal
the transaction by clasping his hand in prayer. That's too ambitious; that presumes Plainview could be merged into a cosy
fellowship ruled by another man's say-so. Never mind that Plainview himself delivers orations on friendship, family and community
when he's speaking in public, to sell his services or smooth the way for his operations. In private, he trusts and loves no
one but H.W.; and when his relationship with the boy is ruptured, call it fate or another catastrophe of mechanics, Plainview's
scorn for Eli Sunday turns into violent hostility.
For all its detailed attention to the building of an industrial fortune, the competition to acquire property, the management
of men and equipment, the drive to control both production and transport, There Will Be Blood develops into a contest of wills
between Plainview and Sunday, and so resolves unexpectedly into an argument about faith. Or, to judge from the malevolent
exuberance of the final scene, perhaps it's an argument against faith.
So where, you might ask, is the revolution? Admirers of Oil! and Nation readers may be disappointed to find that Anderson
has chucked out much of the novel's politics: the labour agitation, the factional debates, the translation of generational
conflict into class struggle. If There Will Be Blood had pretended to give an accurate picture of its era, this would have
been a fatal omission.
But few things can be as useless as a historical drama of historical interest, which is what Anderson would have risked
making had he incorporated material that's wholly outside the experience of most of today's cinemagoers. Instead, he's reasonably
used his period characters to suggest contemporary political meanings. In Plainview's speeches, you hear a forecast of the
present-day public entrepreneur, with his promises that the market (meaning himself) will shower bread, sunshine and good
schools wherever he makes a dollar; while in Sunday's preaching, you hear the voice of every modern fundamentalist election-broker
who declares that Jesus alone (meaning himself) can set our society right.
In reality, as you may have observed, these two figures have been allied for decades. Anderson's twist is to set them
against each other, in an imaginative reordering of society so radical that it almost qualifies as political in itself. He
distorts history, the source novel and your sense of the contemporary scene. And what do you get in exchange? Just the invigoration
of seeing God and man going for each other's throat.
Of course, if Plainview and Sunday were allegorical, there would be no satisfaction in the spectacle. The antagonists
have to be fleshed-out vessels of the promised blood; and so I come to Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Plainview.
You can see how Day-Lewis pieced together the outward elements of the characterisation: the slight stoop and limp that
testify to old injuries suffered in the pit; the huffing and wheezing that suggest years of breathing rock dust and oil fumes;
the grand, baritonal way of forming words, which Plainview must have copied from the era's classiest political speakers; the
habit of pausing and working his jaw, which betrays the agitation simmering beneath every show of patience. Other actors,
too, could have figured out such signs. Day-Lewis establishes them and then makes you forget their presence, much as you ignore
the scaffolding of the oil derrick once the forces of nature come blasting through. The emotion that Day-Lewis taps seems
so spontaneous, and so utterly volcanic, that his performance ought to be listed in the end credits as a special effect, along
with the computer-generated imagery used for the fiery gusher. He is more than an actor, he truly is a force of nature. I
imagine that in preparing the performance, Day-Lewis may have worked backward from his biggest moments, planning when to hint
at restrained fury, when to release a note of sarcasm or contempt and when to let loose an outburst, always increasing the
magnitude toward the climax in the final scene. But this still says nothing about the complexity of the characterization,
for example, the way Plainview will pet and imprison H.W. in a single gesture, or the wonderful paradox of an actor displaying
such phenomenal power while being attentive to everyone else in the scene. Instead of blowing away his fellow players, Day-Lewis
makes them all better by the sheer intensity of his focus upon them. To mention only the most obvious case: the admirable
Paul Dano, who could have played Eli Sunday opposite any Plainview and been memorable, meets the challenge in Day-Lewis's
eyes and makes himself uncanny.
If there had to be one word for There Will Be Blood, in fact, I suppose "uncanny" would do. The score, composed
by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead (with a major assist from Johannes Brahms), wraps you in a brooding, unnerving, exhilarating
atmosphere in which massed strings can swarm like uneasy flies or shriek like a siren. The cinematography, by Robert Elswit,
confronts you with a high, desolate terrain that sometimes, in the shifting light and colour, resembles a crouched and breathing
beast. Plainview wants nothing to do with the otherworldly, and given the screenplay's construction, he emphatically gets
the final word on that subject; but the sounds and images contradict him.
There Will Be Blood is flamboyant rather than immaculate, not just supremely well made but brilliantly and intuitively
expressive; and it leaves you feeling shaken but also a little stronger. Maybe Plainview wins his argument against faith,
but he loses a deeper argument with H.W., one about trust and kindness. His loss, your gain.
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