Mindful violence? Responses to the Rambo series' shifting aesthetic of aggression

Abstract

Rambo (2008) marked the return of Sylvester Stallone's iconic action hero. What is most striking about the fourth film (as the response from reviewers testifies), is its graphic violence. My intention here is to critically engage with Rambo (2008) as rewriting the series' established aesthetic of violence. My overarching aim is to highlight how the popular press has sought to read the 2008 version of Rambo according to the discursive narratives surrounding Stallone's 1980s action films. The negative response to Rambo, I argue, stems from relying on critical patterns that do not fit the film itself.

Keywords:

• Sylvester Stallone
• Rambo
• reception
• violence

Notes

 1. ‘We Get to Win this Time’ featurette on the Sony Pictures 2008 DVD release of First Blood: Part II.

 2. Ibid.

 3. Those reviews constituted only by plot synopses were discarded, as were those reviews that replicated the same information and phrasing verbatim: in these cases, the newspaper with the broadest distribution has been consulted. I did not otherwise make value distinctions between the sources based on their distribution reach: reactions to each film remained consistent in any case. Note that when quoting I have opted for citations that summate the critical pattern most concisely, even if it is not taken from the most broadly distributed news source.

 4. Morrell's commentary for the Sony Pictures 2008 DVD release of First Blood. This is confirmed by Kempley's (1982) review of First Blood that describes the film as ‘non-stop action and violence’. It is perhaps worth noting that Morrell's original vision of Rambo was imbued with this quantitative sensibility, and that this was intended to be translated from book to film; ‘in the original script, [Rambo] was a homicidal psychopath. He killed everybody’ (Chase, 1982).

 5. Jeffords (1994, 84) argues that Rambo III consists ‘almost entirely’ of ‘combat scenes of various kinds’. Having been credited as ‘the most violent film ever made’ by the Guinness Book of World Records (Drake, 2008), quantity is clearly part of the cultural iconography of Rambo III, and subsequently Rambo. Of the critical reviews of Rambo III, a number point to the quantity of violent acts as if they are a measure of the film's worth. The accompanying use of descriptors such as ‘filled’, ‘crammed’, and ‘packed’ with violence, and an insistence on detailing the film's length in comparison with the number of acts of violence (Trott, 1988), indicate that frequency or ‘scale’ as one reviewer puts it (James, 1988) is a central focus for complaint.

 6. As Pangonis (2008) pejoratively states, ‘[i]f the body count of an action film were directly proportional to its quality, Rambo would be the film of the year’.

 7. Praise is offered for Rambo III's ‘dazzling explosions’ (Burke, 1988), and its ‘action showdown’, which Elliott (1988) argues ‘is one of the most strikingly filmed violence ballets ever filmed’.

 8. For example, it is described as ‘horrendous … graphic … brutal stuff’ (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 1988). Hinson (1988) offers similar commentary.

 9. The film is thus described as ‘gruesome’ (The People, 2008; Turkish Daily News 2008); ‘grisly’ (The Sun, 2008); ‘gruelling’ (Macklin, 2008); ‘astonishingly graphic’ (Loder, MTV.com, January 25, 2008); ‘hysterically gory’ (The York Dispatch, 2008); ‘Brutal … barbaric’ (Adams, 2008); ‘bloody, shocking and bloody shocking’ (Total Film, 2008); ‘reprehensible … totally unnecessary’ (Humphries, 2008); ‘nauseating’ (The York Dispatch, 2008); ‘breathtakingly nasty’ (The People, 2008); ‘sickening, almost degenerate’ (Turkish Daily News 2008); ‘repulsive and ridiculous’ (Joyce, 2008). In each case these terms are accompanied by detailed descriptions of violent acts such as ‘limb-severing and skull-bashing’ (Loder, MTV.com, January 25, 2008), ‘bodies being atomized’ (Turkish Daily News 2008), ‘throats being clawed open … arrows penetrating skulls’ (Kalamazoo Gazette, 2008), and ‘grenades turning people into an abstraction of limbs’ (Sunday Business Post, 2008). The consensus is that Rambo is ‘a mess of graphic cruelty’ (Macklin, 2008).

10. Stallone's commentary on the Sony Pictures 2008 DVD release of Rambo.

11. Indeed, one British tabloid suggested that faced with Rambo's revival, ‘it is just as if the previous 20 years of cinema never happened’ (The Sun, 2008). As an example of this tension, Loder's (MTV.com, January 25, 2008) assertion that the fourth film ‘quickly descends into the familiar Rambo world of endless annihilation’ fails to adequately account for how this world has changed, and is contradicted by his subsequent remark that ‘[e]ven in a cinematic age as murderous as our own, the movie is exceptionally violent’.

12. While for some, quantity is marked as a fulfilment of expectation (one reviewer stating that the bloodshed occurs with ‘satisfying regularity’ (Antagony & Ecstasy blog post, 2008), others frame the quantitative violence of Rambo as indicative of escalating aggression across the series (McCoy, 2008). This of course may be read precisely as a promise that the film ‘delivers’ for audience members who are invested in the genre.

13. The same connotations apply to the terms ‘gore porn’ (Total Film, 2008), ‘death porn’, and ‘blood porn’ (Byrnes, 2008), all of which are used to describe Rambo.

14. The terms ‘dull’ (The Sunday Independent 2008), ‘dreary’ (Sunday Business Post, 2008), and ‘unimaginative’ (Adams, 2008) are used elsewhere to the same ends.

15. Similarly problematic is Pangonis' (2008) dismissal – ‘the movie does provide some kicks for sadists and 8-year-olds’ – and Tookey's (2008) ‘observation’ that ‘Rambo can safely be recommended to people who hate intelligence and love exploding body parts.’

16. Indeed, Stallone's comments regarding the impact of sound on ‘the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system[s]’ in the commentary for the Sony Pictures 2008 DVD release of Rambo demonstrates an awareness of the effect violence would have on the audience.

17. The combination is pejoratively termed as ‘grafting’ (Hodgson, 2008) and ‘attaching’ (Byrnes, 2008).

18. Morrell's commentary for the Sony Pictures 2008 DVD release of First Blood.

19. On the role of wisecracking and perceptions of violence in the action film, see King (2000) and Ayers (2008, 56).