Rambo Returns to Kill More Asians
February 12, 2008
When last we saw Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo, it was in 1988’s Rambo III, and he was fighting the Soviet military in Afghanistan alongside the heroic Mujahedeen — a Charlie Wilson on steroids and without the blow or the strippers. Since then, the world has changed. The Soviet Union is no more, and the once U.S.-friendly Mujahedeen morphed into the Taliban and Al Qaeda (as Rambo, a man of few words, might say: “Oops.”).
The Middle East is still a hotbed of war, and if Rambo were to return in our post-9/11 landscape to save the world, it would logically be in that troubled part of the world. But since the Middle East conflicts are not only controversial but also box office poison, Rambo instead returns in his fourth outing (simply titled Rambo) to do what he does best — kill Asians. Lots of them.
Granted in the first film of the series, First Blood, he wasn’t killing Asians, but there was no doubt that the establishment hicks he went up against were a surrogate for the enemy he fought back in Vietnam. And by Rambo II, no surrogates were necessary: Rambo went back to Vietnam to win the war single-handedly and kill lots of Vietcong in the process.
In Rambo, directed and co-written by star Stallone, our titular hero is back in Asia. He’s living the peaceful life of a river guide in Thailand and presumably spends most of his time ironing his bandannas and killing snakes. When he leads a bunch of American missionaries, including a smoking hot female missionary played by Julie Benz, into the civil war-torn
How much exactly? According to Los Angeles Times film writer John Mueller, 236 people get killed in Rambo. Compare that to the one person killed in First Blood, the 69 in Rambo II and 132 in Rambo III. A guess as to how many of the casualties in this new film are Asian?
I’ve heard some defend Rambo by saying that it brings much-needed attention to the 60-year-old Burmese-Karen conflict. No argument from me about the brutality of that conflict, especially the Burmese militia’s iron fist rule, but this film is as much about the realities of that situation as John Wayne’s Green Berets was about the realities of Vietnam.
If anything, Stallone uses the Burmese military as a surrogate for Al Qaeda or Iraqi insurgents; this is a film about our country’s collective fantasy of kicking the asses of those evil, brown-skinned, Allah-worshipping terrorists. But because of the controversy that would arise if Rambo directly addressed that, Stallone picks another target to get his message across — an easier, safer target — yes, those evil Asians from (insert name of most recent evil Asian country in the news).
As I write this, the film has been in theaters for two weeks, and aside from criticisms from the usual suspects (thank you, Angry Asian Man), Rambo has not been greeted with the type of protests that would have surely met it had the filmmakers picked on another group. Can you imagine the outrage if Rambo decided to go into the inner city slums to kill over 200 black and Latino characters who are portrayed as rapists, murderers, pedophiles and all-around sadists who kidnap good white folk? Yet, that very thing is done to Asians, and it’s mostly dismissed as harmless entertainment.
There’s one “positive” Asian character in the film who fights alongside Rambo. But there were also good “house negroes” who defended the practice of slavery. If this really were a film with an agenda to illuminate the situation in
Because Rambo is a modest success, there is talk of another sequel. Before we see Rambo killing the yellow hordes in
Philip W. Chung is a writer and co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble. Lodestone’s annual Oscar party fund-raiser will be on Sunday, Feb. 24, in Los Angeles. For more info: www.lodestonetheatre.org.
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8 Responses to “Rambo Returns to Kill More Asians”
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we ought to be fighting the martians (read as
terrorists) or going out in droves to
buy the new michael jackson 25th anniversary
thriller album!
it’s a joke????
stupid article!
Does he actually kill the Asians? It is a movie.
idiot
I think this must be a joke…are you kidding? Like somebody else said, IT’S A MOVIE. What an Idiot!
well, it’s probably easier to sit through than 3 hours of the Sand Pebbles…
Last things here first:
Art Hu: You should stop “reviewing” movies, new OR old, since you evince no scintilla of “understanding” same, much less perceiving same through the lenses of the “culture” that produced same, never mind EITHER the “craft” OR “artistic” elements.
For Kwanimator, GUNFRONTIER and Rhakine Thar:
I have NEWS for you, from a galaxy not all that far away and, actually, far too close for comfort:
Gollywood flicks and fantasies RULE the American sense and lack of real, as opposed to “reel”-, life, awarenesses. And, more to the point here, the perceptions AND reactions to the realities, no, not those staged telly shows, of life on ALL the mean streets of a seemingly mean world.
Consider the fact that Reagan and, shudder, Dubya were/are both the living and death-dealing Darth Vaders of recent and contemporaneous “realpolitik.”
Worse, still, think about the fact that the Gollywood playbook of promo/hype and TelePrompter scripts
has SHAPED American politics for the past half-century and more.
Yesterday, a new Aussie governance “apologized” to the aborigines for historic outrages. Has THIS government even begun to acknowledge same for “our” shame in re all the native Nations of North America?
And how can ANYone, even a rabid evangelical televangelist, even BEGIN to make amends, reparations?, to the “black,” “niggers” they used to call them, “citizens” of this “great” nation. “Democracy”?
So, in those contexts, night slasher and Mike Davies, Phil Chung’s take on the idiot “Rambo” movies are not only well-motivated, they are NECESSARY, precisely because of the likes of you guys.
This is LIFE, kiddos, and movies like the Rambos and ersatz “heroes” like John Wayne, albeit he may well have been a great guy in the flesh, are a curse on humanity and a blot on “morality.”
Cootinue playing your killing games in the arcades, but, please, spare us the juvey justifications in claptrap like ALL those histrionics.
Frank Eng
P.S.: Art Hu, please get a grip on recent American “history” beyond your personal peccadillos.
Are you serious? Of course it involves Asians. The crisis that is the subject of the movie takes place in Burma. Should they have gotten Irish actors to play the parts of the militia?! Rambo movies stem from his past as a highly trained soldier in the Vietnam war. Would it make sense if his character was used to fight the mafia in NYC, or back in time to fight the Confederate South?? Relax already.