First Blood
Rambo: First Blood Part II
Rambo III
Rambo
and now Rambo: Last Blood
I can't say I'm the biggest Rambo fan in the world considering I've never seen the second or third installments of the franchise. I think the first one is fine, but I thought the fourth one was great. So, my expectations were probably a little heightened for the newest one.
Don't see it. It's bad. It's Rambo meets Taken and not in a good way.
John's doing just fine on his ranch. He's raising his niece, digging tunnels underneath the ranch, and breaking some horses. It's a good life. But then his niece decides to travel to Mexico to find her dad, and ask him why he left. And things go very, very bad from there.
As it is, it's not a wholely bad setup. Rambo has to go down to Mexico to rescue his niece from some bad men. While there, Rambo gets his butt kicked. He's brought back to health by a journalist (played by Paz Vega) who has her own reasons to want to see those bad men taken down.
What follows is carnage. Lots and lots of carnage. And while that's usually something I'm all about, in this case, it just doesn't do it. Besides being a bleak film, it's also poorly written. That journalist from before, when we first meet her, she wants justice. When we meet her a second time, she wants Rambo to stay away. I shouldn't notice things like that in an action movie. When I do, you know the movie is getting lazy.
I guess what's most disappointing is that the movie doesn't feel like a Rambo movie. It just feels generic.
*
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Day 2884 - Soylent Green
Soylent Green is supposed to be one of those movies that has a "Gotcha!" ending. And while it does, as I watched it, I realized that's not what the movie is about. What it's actually about is Charlton Heston's Detective Thorn, a police officer in a society where there is population overload and food is at a premium. I find it incredibly interesting that at night while the streets are empty the buildings are overflowing with people sleeping in the stairwells.
Heston's cop is crooked, but not overly so. He pretty much takes anything not nailed down at a dead guy's apartment (mostly food). He beats up suspects. But he's assigned to investigate a murder, and he does. This movie isn't about "Soylent Green," it's about a cop who realizes that his existence is there only to slow the wave of inevitability. Society is at a tipping point, and he's in the midst of it. And the knowledge he ends up with creates a righteous anger that will only let that wave come crashing down.
Now I'm reading much more into this movie than it probably intends, but Charlton Heston thrives in this role, and that makes our journey through this dystopian future easy to navigate. And he's ably complimented by Edward G. Robinson as Heston's best friend whose discovery of this world's secrets break him so completely is fantastic in his final role. Leigh-Taylor Young is great as the prostitute/piece of furniture who falls into/is forced into a relationship with Heston's character.
This isn't a perfect movie or even the most perfect sci-fi film. But the reason it has lasted in the public psyche as long as it has, is because it creates a very real world (the production design and the use of extras is tremendous), and the acting lets us believe it.
***
Heston's cop is crooked, but not overly so. He pretty much takes anything not nailed down at a dead guy's apartment (mostly food). He beats up suspects. But he's assigned to investigate a murder, and he does. This movie isn't about "Soylent Green," it's about a cop who realizes that his existence is there only to slow the wave of inevitability. Society is at a tipping point, and he's in the midst of it. And the knowledge he ends up with creates a righteous anger that will only let that wave come crashing down.
Now I'm reading much more into this movie than it probably intends, but Charlton Heston thrives in this role, and that makes our journey through this dystopian future easy to navigate. And he's ably complimented by Edward G. Robinson as Heston's best friend whose discovery of this world's secrets break him so completely is fantastic in his final role. Leigh-Taylor Young is great as the prostitute/piece of furniture who falls into/is forced into a relationship with Heston's character.
This isn't a perfect movie or even the most perfect sci-fi film. But the reason it has lasted in the public psyche as long as it has, is because it creates a very real world (the production design and the use of extras is tremendous), and the acting lets us believe it.
***
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