January 24, 2008 - Some 26 years after creating one of the most famous characters of his career, Sylvester Stallone has revived John Rambo one last time for an explosive final chapter of the First Blood film series. But Rambo, which one guesses is named to evoke the successful, similarly cathartic Rocky Balboa - itself a signifier that the franchise's main character has transcended the boundaries of roman-numeral sequels - isn't merely a finale. Rather, it's an action epic, a message movie, and an epilogue to the character's story, if not also Stallone's career. At the same time, its overabundance of intentions puts it at cross purposes with what its audience wants - namely, nihilistic one-man carnage - which puts Rambo in the unique if unenviable position of being a film we're supposed to enjoy emptily and take seriously at the same time.

Stallone of course returns as Rambo, who now lives in Northern Thailand as a snake trapper and monosyllabic utterer. When a group of missionaries approaches him to lead them up river to help refugees from the Burmese military, Rambo initially declines, citing the deadly conditions of the territory; but after Sarah (Julie Benz) makes an emotional plea to preserve the victims' humanity, if not his own as well, he agrees. Unfortunately, the missionaries are intercepted by the military soon after Rambo drops them off in the Burmese jungle. Feeling responsible, Rambo agrees to help a ragtag bunch of mercenaries hired to rescue them, in the process being confronted by a lifetime of killing - unfortunately by having to do a whole lot more of it.

The film opens with documentary footage of the actual situation in Burma, which has endured what the film describes as the longest civil war in history. These scenes include shots of bodies and atrocities that place Rambo in a definitive real-world context - which essentially means that what we're seeing is "true" rather than part of a screenwriter's feverish imagination. While this certainly defines the character as a person rather than a leftover 1980s action hero, it also unfortunately proves to be a fairly huge problem once the film shifts into overdrive and the bullets start flying. There are things depicted in this film so terrible that they are impossible to enjoy, which simultaneously posits Rambo's inevitable retaliation as both a justifiable catharsis and dubious exploitation of actual inhumanities.

As a character, Rambo is much harder to redeem - both personally and cinematically - than Stallone's Balboa; in the series' previous installment, Rambo III, he teamed up with Afghani rebels (Mujahedeen) to fight the Russians, which certainly places him in a dubious historical context. But what isn't clear is precisely how cynical the film is, in terms of redeeming Rambo within a world that is so full of violence. Stallone, who wrote the script and directed, creates a compelling dramatic counterpoint in Sarah and Michael (Paul Schulze), two sanctimonious missionaries who quickly discover that their ideals mean little in a winner-takes-all war zone. The two of them appeal of Rambo's dissipating humanity, but when they are captured they require his animosity; at one point Michael castigates Rambo for killing a boat full of river patrolmen who wanted to abscond with Sarah, and then later he succumbs to violence during an escape attempt.

I really don't know if the film is supposed to be saying that violence is sometimes necessary, or that violence is necessarily destructive, and I don't have an opinion either way. But it creates an uncomfortable moral quandary that is never quite answered, and is in fact glossed over by the enjoyment we are supposed to derive when Rambo shows up in the back of a jeep, unloading millions of rounds from a gatling gun into bodies that liquefy and explode on contact. At one point midway through the film another audience member in the preview screening I attended clapped at the sight of Rambo using his trademark bow and arrows, and I leaned over to my companion and said "I don't mean it as a criticism, but I feel like it's completely inappropriate to applaud at anything in this film." The movie works too hard - and in the end, too effectively - creating a palpable reality for the violence to allow us the empty escapism of what passes for action; it's as if someone tacked a scene from Shoot 'Em Up onto the end of Saving Private Ryan and assumed the two would somehow form a cohesive whole.

During the film's press day I voiced my concerns to another colleague who agreed and then rejoined, "but you're thinking about this movie way too much." He's probably right - Rambo is not a character who has historically demanded deeper examination, and probably benefits from a more lightweight examination of his earlier films' vague politically-relevant wish fulfillment themes. But Stallone doesn't quite seem game any more for those kinds of films, even if we as audiences still are; hell, what surprised me most about the film was not what it made me think about, but that it made me think at all.

That said, First Blood was in its way actually about something, even if its sequels reduced that message - something about disenfranchised Vietnam veterans and their shaky postwar reintroduction to society - the sum total of bodies that could be counted by the time the final credits rolled. In other words, this fourth and by all accounts final installment is a satisfactory and engaging sequel to the first film, but a more or less illegitimate successor to the other two movies. Like Rocky Balboa, John Rambo is now officially an indelible part of the pop culture fabric, but unlike Stallone's pugilist alter ego there's no way to separate his superficial victories from his more substantial ones. All of which means that Rambo ranks as the overall series' second-best entry, but in an age when escapism no longer serves as an easy escape, a movie about a one-man army makes for underwhelming odds against reality's horrors.