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The word "bloodbath" tends to get thrown around at every garden-variety onscreen massacre these days.
That said, Rambo is the closest you will experience to a churning soak in a Jacuzzi full of Type O-negative.
I didn't think to start counting when the movie started, but there are literally dozens of heads blown clean off in loving closeup. Every time a landmine blows, it sprays a blood-red geyser. Arms and legs are hacked away. People are fed to pigs. Our hero disembowels a bad guy and lets him roll downhill, his entrails flapping around like abdominal dreadlocks.
No, this is not your father's Rambo. Your first clue is that he drops an F-bomb in his first two lines in the movie (and I think he only has about eight in total).
With two decades having passed since Stallone last filmed an adventure for his Viet vet soldier-of-fortune (a not-very-prescient Afghanistan foray in which the bad guys were Russians and the good guys had names like Osama and Omar), give the man credit for keeping up with how numbed we've become to screen violence.
All he needed was a suitably monstrous enemy straight out of the headlines -- someone whose brutal death we could cheer without guilt. Darfur would have seemed obvious, except that George Clooney and Don Cheadle have dibs on the moral high ground of that massacre.
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So he picked Myanmar (which the movie continues to call Burma, presumably because it's easier to pronounce). The thumbnail Rambo version of the troubles there is that the military junta of that country is at war with its Christian citizens.
So it is that John Rambo, world-weary warrior, is approached by a handful of Christian missionaries looking to lure him away from the living he has been making in rural Thailand capturing cobras to be used in local entertainment. (There's no question that in his 60s, Stallone is still pretty cut).
He takes an immediate dislike to the leader Michael (Paul Schulze) who tells him killing is wrong and un-Christian, a kind of ungrateful sentiment after Rambo wipes out a boatload of pirates who were intent on killing them and gang-raping the lone woman in their mission (Dexter's Julie Benz). Needless to say, Michael eventually comes to learn that -- Jesus notwithstanding --sometimes a man's gotta kill what a man's gotta kill.
Having left the God squad to their business in a war zone, Rambo is soon approached by another worried missionary, Michael's boss, who has hired a multinational team of mercenaries (led by an obnoxious Australian) to bring his flock back.
So it is that we find ourselves once again with Americans penned up in bamboo lockups like animals in the jungles of Southeast Asia, at the mercy of sadistic armed men in camouflage pyjamas. Damned Vietnamese ... er, I mean Burmese!
Turn your brain off from all geopolitical awareness and critical considerations, and just let Rambo roll over you like a "sick" video game ("sick" in the way kids mean it these days, like "cool"), and Rambo delivers mindless violence in spades. Stallone himself doesn't seem to be making any statement (his longest line in the movie is "you're either livin' for nothin' or dyin' for somethin' ") -- a far cry from Ted Kotcheff's original Rambo movie First Blood, which was ostensibly a serious rumination on the fate of the people we train to kill once we're done with them.
(This film is rated 18-A)