Cynically using the decades-long Burmese civil war as a
backdrop for grisly and unremitting violence, muscle-headed action flick Rambo
comes off as a sad and empty attempt to be politically relevant. Coming almost
two decades after the last series entry, and on the heels of the successful
commercial and critical reception of 2006’s Rocky
Balboa, which located fresh narrative terrain and provided a perfect
emotive bookend to multi-hyphenate Sylvester Stallone’s other signature
franchise, this sloppy, nihilistic effort feels especially sour and out of step
with modern convention.

Picking up Vietnam
veteran John Rambo’s story some 20 years later, Stallone posits the character
as psychologically unable to return home, now living a solitary, monastic
lifestyle in southeast Asia. That would be fine, except that this element is
pure window dressing — an excuse for a parade of brutality (including bayoneted
kids) that does nothing except showcase several dozen different ways to take a
life.

The film opens in northern Thailand,
where Rambo ekes out a subsistence catching poisonous snakes for cash
and running a longboat along the Salween
River. It’s this latter fact that
brings him to the attention of a group of Colorado
missionaries headed up by Sarah Miller (Julie Benz) and Michael Burnett (Paul
Schulze). Sarah, Michael and their group want to go to Burma
to lend moral support to the Karen tribe, an ethnic Christian minority at war
with the internationally isolated ruling military junta. Rambo at first spurns
their request for transport, but eventually relents. Along the way, there’s a
confrontation with Burmese river pirates, and Rambo is forced to abandon his
newfound pacifism in defense of his passengers.

Weeks later Rambo learns that the missionaries are now being
held captive by a particularly sadistic unit of the Burmese military, obviously
outside of diplomatic reach. He’s hired by the missionaries’ leader to ferry a
team of mercenary soldiers, including gruff director Lewis (Graham McTavish)
and sniper Schoolboy (Matthew Marsden), to the point he last saw the group.
Naturally, Rambo’s conscience kicks in, along with old killer instincts, and
the limbs, heads and throats of many a swarthy Burmese soldier pay the price.

Rambo opens with real-life images from the quelled
pro-democracy demonstrations in late September of last year, protests which
were met with brutal force. Whether by function of budget constraint or edit, the
rest of the film seems pared down to relatively straightforward action set
piece entanglements, an ill-advised strategy which casts further doubt on the
movie’s wishes to be taken as anything more than a barely linked series of
lopped arms and exploded chests.

The character of Rambo, a Reagan-era re-branding of the
forward-leaning, wounded ego vigilantism that was left over from the United
States’ Vietnam debacle, was always going to be more of a relic of time and
place than Rocky, and thus harder to update. The movie’s script, a shared
credit by Stallone and Art Monterastelli, has nothing interesting to say about
that, though, and plumbs its lead character’s psyche solely by way of one
nightmare montage featuring black-and-white footage from the first three films.
There’s an uncomfortable subtext to be found, too, in the uninterrupted
debasement and abuse of local women, while the same sort of violence against Sarah
is only intimated.

Unanchored to anything of substantive emotional value, the film’s action is suitably explosive and over-the-top —
at one point Rambo rigs an unexploded World War II shell to take out several
hundred yards of jungle — but it reaches such a level of cartoonish extreme so
as to seem almost desperate in its attempt to woo an audience who know the Rambo
films only as late-night cable TV entries.

Shot on location in and around Chiang
Mai, Thailand,
the movie certainly makes good use of its natural surroundings, at least during
daylight exteriors. A night-time, rain-soaked rescue operation, though — a
centerpiece of the movie’s second act — seems designed chiefly to cheat the
fact that a similar sequence in the light of day would have been much more
costly. Stallone’s staging here is messy and confusing, and cinematographer
Glen MacPherson (16 Blocks, One Missed Call) loses a battle to shadow. The
result is much more irritating than thrilling. Brian Tyler’s very
literal-minded musical compositions, meanwhile, are in perfectly ridiculous
lockstep with the movie’s demonstrative finale. For the full, original, and slightly longer review, from Screen International, click here.

An exercise in guerrilla-style genre
filmmaking that reframes a classic monster movie conceit as a post-September 11
allegory of big city trepidation, new Internet sensation Cloverfield emerges from the cocoon of its pre-release hype as thrilling
piece of terror tailor-made for our times. Skillfully evoking more dread than
lasting cathartic release, the sensibly-budgeted film should make its mark as
the first hit of 2008, connecting strongly with the 18-34-year-old demographic
and other genre fans looking for comfortably familiar stories with exciting new
trappings.

Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which took advantage of nascent Internet
marketing to whip audience interest into a fervor, Cloverfield is an exercise in “found footage” subjectivity, unfolding
completely in handheld style, with often canted or shaky camerawork. Crucial to
whether Cloverfield commercially connects
anything at all like that film, which rang up $140 million domestically and
another $110 million internationally, is the question of whether mainstream audiences
unfamiliar with its pre-release branding buy tickets.

At the very least Cloverfield should easily outpace Snakes on a Plane — the last big pre-release, viral marketing sensation,
which ended up pulling in a disappointing $60 million worldwide. But while PG-13
films like 2005’s White Noise ($90
million worldwide), Boogeyman ($67
million internationally) and Hide and
Seek ($122 million worldwide) have proven there’s a January market for
supernatural-tinged thrillers, courting the portion of that core audience that
may be resistant to outright monster flicks will determine its final box office
tally. To its advantage, Cloverfield
arrives with a much bigger buzz, thanks to the participation of producer and Lost hit-maker J.J. Abrams, as well as
its unique style and framing device. These elements, plus its superb execution,
give the movie top-shelf ancillary value that will ensure both profitability and
potential spin-offs for other platforms and outlets.

Like The
Blair Witch Project, the film chronicles the plight of a group of young
people fighting for their lives trapped in an unforgiving outdoors, in this
case an urban jungle under siege by a gargantuan rampaging monster, and
hundreds of hostile smaller, scurrying creatures which pose every bit as much
of a threat. The film opens chillingly, with a silent
title card that stamps the subsequent video camera footage as a found audiovisual
document, from the U.S. military. The first portion of the tape reveals the tender morning
after a hook-up between long-time friends Rob (Michael David-Stahl) and Beth
(Odette Yustman). The videotape, and thus the movie, then leaps forward a
month, to the evening of a huge going-away party for Rob, who’s preparing to
move to Japan as part of a big promotion.

Tasked by his girlfriend Lily (Jessica
Lucas) with recording the event, Rob’s brother, Jason (Mike Vogel), passes off
the duty to friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who fruitlessly tries to engage Marlena
(Lizzy Caplan) in flirtatious small talk. The party takes a turn for the
awkward when Beth shows up with another guy. Rob’s suppressed feelings of affection
come bubbling to the surface, words are spoken in anger, and Beth leaves.

Suddenly, a massive jolt shakes the remaining
revelers, and the power goes out. As the group heads outside to see what
exactly has happened, fireballs explode on the horizon, and utter havoc is unleashed.
After one route of evacuation is sealed, Rob receives a distraught cell phone
message from Beth, and becomes determined to make his way to her apartment to
try to find her. Friends in tow, the group sets out, but when the destruction
and fighting on the streets between the creature and the National Guard gets
too intense, they seek shelter underground, and try to traverse subterranean subway
tracks.

Nicely balancing confusion and
interpersonal anxiety with these grander, under-siege segments, Drew Goddard’s
screenplay is a thing a pared down grace and lean, muscular virtuosity. It
starts by sketching out the underpinnings of character in fine fashion. After
18 brisk, well-plotted minutes of typically angsty young adult introduction, the
movie yields to mayhem — basically an hour-long dash through urban hell.

As with other apocalyptic and sci-fi
movies, Cloverfield squeezes some
bedazzlement out of the destruction of familiar, iconic buildings and
monuments. Here it’s the Brooklyn Bridge, in a grim obliteration that serves as the film’s first mass-scale,
panicky set piece. There’s also the beheaded Statue of Liberty, which arrives
early in the movie, and additionally serves as the perfect visual metaphor for America’s
still-lingering apprehension over the state of world events and its own
security. Yet director Matt Reeves (a co-creator of
TV’s Felicity, whose other feature
credit is 1996’s The Pallbearer) also
proves himself effective at simplistic evocative imagery, as with a coachman-less
horse-drawn carriage wandering through Central
Park.

Key to substantial gratification with Cloverfield are two bits of necessary surrender:
succumbing to its overall framing device, and accepting the notion that such
trauma unfolds against a PG-13 backdrop, which is only really a matter of
language, coming after movies like Superbad
and the Hostel films have made coarse exclamatory talk integral to their stamp of “realism” within their respective
genres. The action sequences here — including a bravura night-vision attack in the
subway tunnel — are so tensely effective as to eradicate any legitimate
quibbles with the rating for the rest of movie, a problem that arguably plagued Live Free or Die Hard last summer, at least in advance of its release.

Cineastes holding on steadfastly to the notion
that less is more may balk at the degree to which the film reveals its monster.
While it’s true that this does, if not undercut, at least muddy the water with
respect to the movie’s metaphorical associations, it’s interestingly handled
within the framework of the film, and seems a commercial tip of the cap as much
as anything. It’s undeniable that Cloverfield
is, at its core, a metaphor for the terror and uncertainty of the real world,
from its aforementioned iconic poster image and willfully vague tagline (“Some
thing has found us”), which makes no mention of a CGI monster on which millions
of dollars was spent, to specific dialogue of choking despondency (“I don’t
know why this is happening”). It’s incidentally a monster thriller. Like much
good cinema, Cloverfield works on multiple levels.
For the full, slightly longer original review, from Screen International, click here.