Rambo has become a nihilist.
Sylvester Stallone’s Green Beret, who started as a tragic representation of Vietnam veteran neglect in the original film and morphed into a superhero soldier by the third, is back for a fourth outing.
This one plunges John Rambo into the gun sights of the brutal military dictatorship of Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma, where in real life the ruling junta recently received international condemnation for its violent suppression of a pro-democracy uprising led by Buddhist monks.
The movie’s story, which borrows from tales of real-life atrocities but is otherwise fictional, involves Rambo reluctantly helping missionaries traverse the wilderness of the Salween River on their way to deliver supplies to camps of war-ravaged refugees.
Rambo has spent the past two decades living in the region as a hermit, one who has shed patriotism, lost his faith and given up on humanity.