Rambo

Haunted ex-G.I. John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) accompanies a group of mercenaries into Burma to rescue a group of aid workers.

Rambo is everything the wildly disappointing Die Hard 4 wasn’t: a successful resurrection of a franchise by returning to what made it great in the first place.

As a director, Stallone proves himself more than capable. Granted, he does include a useless voice-over/flashback sequence at the film’s mid-point that should have been more haunting, but he more than makes up for it with the sweeping action sequences that form the film’s core. Further, the location photography is top-notch and belies the film’s relatively low budget.

As an actor Stallone plays Rambo as a hulking, beast of a man, drawn to the very violence that haunts him. He looks and feels the part, with his extra years adding an increased gravitas to his performance. While his scenes with Julie Benz are painfully wooden, this is more a fault with the script than his or Benz’s performances.

Now, about that script. There’s no getting around it. Some of the dialog, especially in the first half, is wincingly bad. Not so much that it ruins the movie, but enough that it keeps a good movie from being great. Still, if your biggest complaint in an action movie is the dialog, the filmmakers did a descent job.