Dear Sylvester Stallone, please make Rambo 5 a movie where you waste ISIS. This is what the world needs.
This week, a story hit the internet which placed Stallone at Comic-Con stating: “We have teams scouting Iraq and parts of Syria where ISIS have their greatest strongholds. We’re working with the locals there to help deliver the most intense and realistic Rambo movie experience ever.”
This has since been labelled inaccurate, despite being reported on by major news sites around the world. It’s said to have stemmed from a fake article, and Stallone may not have even been at the San Diego convention. But I really, really hope that there’s a skerrick of truth to it.
Rambo going into the Middle East and butchering Islamic State members would be an intensely satisfying film, and it would have the potential to nicely close a loop left open with Rambo III. I’ll come back to that.
First, let’s look back at 2008’s Rambo.
While the action genre has been watered down over the last couple of decades, largely due to movie studios going for shitty PG-13 rated fare, there has been a lot of incredibly kick ass R-rated additions to the action movie greats list. Here’s lookin’ at you Mad Max: Fury Road, John Wick, The Raid & The Raid 2, Apocalypto, Punisher: War Zone, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Drug War, Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing & Undisputed 3: Redemption, Crank: High Voltage and Ninja: Shadow of a Tear to name but a few.
But Rambo stands apart from most of those films. It is incredibly violent, but with a low-brow, old-school purity and a grimly nasty tone that I adore.
In the ’00s, genre films got particularly hardcore. Video nasties that had been banned for decades became readily available through global internet DVD sales and illegal file-sharing websites, and a resurgence in harder-edged horror saw things like the Saw and Hostel franchises become mainstream. In the indie/arthouse horror scene, 2002’s Irreversible blew minds before shockers dropped like Inside, Antichrist, Martyrs, August Underground’s Mordum, and then the decade ended with 2010’s truly offensive Serbian Film.
While Rambo wasn’t nearly as on-the-nose as that Balkan slice of extreme, perverted unpleasantness, it has a raw brutality to it that has to be seen to be believed. It’s largely CG-created carnage, but it’s directed well and is remarkably gratifying for the strong-stomached action junkie. It doesn’t have much hand-to-hand combat, but there’s an absurd amount of firearm kills, along with various blades, explosives and of course bow & arrow massacring.
It’s almost unthinkable that Sly went from the brilliance of Rambo to the spirit-crushing mediocrity of The Expendables trilogy.
In Rambo, the titular hero and his mates are eviscerating Burmese bad guys who rule over the local population, keeping them in terrible poverty, raping & killing for shits & giggles. The main bad guy leader is also a paedophile, just to make him even more worthy of the audience’s hatred. It lessens any guilty feelings one may have about thoroughly enjoying seeing Southeast Asian villains be blown to pieces and disemboweled by a snarling old white man.
Sly did “thorough research” to find the most dangerous, ruthless place in the world at the time, which I’m pretty sure means he asked one single question of a mate who had some idea of global affairs.
And so, the film follows John Rambo as he joins some mercenaries on a mission to save some Christian, anti-violence campaigners from Burmese savages that take them captive. There’s a blunt pro-violence message in Rambo personified with one of the Christians who goes from condemning lethal force, even when it’s used to save lives, to ending a man’s life by repeatedly bashing a rock into his skull.
Over the last six or so years, Stallone has talked about Rambo 5 fairly frequently. At one point he said it’d see the veteran going up against a yeti-like monster, while another time saying he’d lay waste to a Mexican drug cartel. But it’s Rambo vs ISIS that is the natural fit for Rambo: Last Blood and the exact movie this man needs to make.
ISIS is not a group of people with a different ideology that we need to respect or tolerate in any way. They’re an appalling criminal organisation and they need to be wiped out.
Anyone who says things like “Muslims don’t denounce ISIS enough” is an ignorant fool. The Islamic world has consistently damned the group’s actions, publically. Moreover, Muslims are the primary victims of this thuggish cult of barbarians, and make up the vast majority of the heroes fighting against them.
Islamic doctrine is not what ISIS practices even though they pretend they do. They’re about as Muslim as Hitler was Christian, twisting various sections of the Quran to justify their evil ways, dramatically jeopardising peace in the Middle East and basically being the worst examples of modern humanity imaginable.
I believe that the vast majority of the 1.6 billion Muslims living in the world today would love seeing Rambo brutally slaughtering ISIS shitheads just as much as I would. And I would love it a great deal indeed, if you haven’t already gathered that.
Would it be distasteful? ISIS is a real-world terrorist death cult carrying out unspeakable evil – killing, raping and ruling with tyranny right now, as I write this. Making a film, a piece of entertainment, that includes such a group does raise morality issues.
For some, these issues will be too powerful to enjoy a film in which ISIS members are obliterated violently for our viewing pleasure. I respect that. I found the real-world footage of actual violence in Burma at the start of Rambo unpleasant. No matter how hard a bonehead like Sly tries to make a gritty and realistic film, it’s always going to end up fairly cartoonish and hence its use of real-world atrocity footage is troublesome.
It was also unnecessary given just how incredibly evil the fictional Burmese villain characters were portrayed in the film. Even if viewers are unaware of just how abhorrent ISIS is, the next movie could establish that pretty efficiently, without any non-fictional footage being used. And for those of us who are aware of the level of their depravity, just using the context of these real-world, current day villains would give the action a delicious potency and make their comeuppance all the more pleasurable. I’m confident this satisfaction would overpower any distastefulness using ISIS may produce, if the film is made carefully enough.
If it does end up being crass and somewhat objectionable, that should be at the expense of ISIS rather than their victims. Look, it may be hard to justify in words, but I can assure you my heart would be in the right place if I stood in a cinema cheering and pumping my fist in the air watching Rambo tear the throat out of a fictionalised version of Jihadi John or one of his mates. I might have mixed feelings about it, but it would be righteous. Trust me.
In Rambo III, John teamed up with freedom fighters in Afghanistan to smash some mean old Russians. The film ended with this message:
That title card was changed on DVDs after the September 11 attacks on America, because some Mujahideen groups went on to join and/or assist Al Qaeda and the Taliban. After the US invasion of Iraq, sub-group ‘Al Qaeda of Iraq’ sprang up, which eventually led – in part – to ISIS. They split completely from Al Qaeda in February 2014, because they were too horrible even for that horrible group. That’s pretty damn horrible.
But it could be that a few of the Mujahideen good guys from Rambo III went bad over the years since their noble ousting of Russian invaders and are now in ISIS, carrying out terrorism in Iraq, Syria and beyond. John Rambo coming face-to-face with these once-allies, and killing them, could make for a very interesting story.
Rambo ended with Rambo walking down a long rural driveway, past a mailbox with R. RAMBO printed on it. It left the ensuing familial redemption John Rambo with “R. Rambo” up to the viewer’s imagination, which was nice.
It would be incredibly nice to see John Rambo destroy ISIS in a bloody fantasy of brutal justice that sees him find ultimate redemption and closes the franchise climactically with its most insane violence and highest body count yet.
Please, Mr Stallone, make it happen.
Sincerely,
Daniel Rutledge.
