Wow….just…wow. Remember the days when action films were big, loud, and violent-as-fuck? Sylvester Stallone certainly does and his latest (last?) outing as Rambo definitely proves it. This is real deal 80’s action cinema at its finest - not the polished, “blockbuster” stuff, but the sort of down and dirty, late night double feature action flick that only the rudest and crudest of downtown theaters dared advertise on their marquee. This 2008 model Rambo is a gleefully irresponsible orgy of violence, chock full of the fist pumping machismo and pseudo political subtext that made this series the definitive male experience of the “Me” decade.

It’s been twenty years since John Rambo answered his last call of duty, and the sullen warrior has since retired to the jungles of Thailand. Getting by on his meager earnings from catching poisonous snakes and fishing, Rambo’s simple life is suddenly complicated by the arrival of a group of missionaries who want him to escort them to the Thai-Burma border, where a bloody civil war has raged for more than half-a-century. Rambo initially refuses their request, but, after some chiding by Sarah (Julie Benz),the group’s lone female member, he reluctantly agrees. When the missionaries go missing, however, Rambo feels compelled to lead a group of mercenaries hired by the church to retrieve their members into the heart of the conflict, whereupon Rambo does what he does best…a whole lotta killing.

Much like he did with Rocky Balboa, Stallone has managed to successfully resuscitate a character most of us thought died with the eighties, and the result is an absolute blast to behold. While the Rambo of yesteryear was a trim and chiseled killing machine, this 60 year old model looks like a man carved out of a slab of granite, with world-weary eyes and a perpetual grimace that betrays decades of suffering, both physical and mental. While the 80’s Rambo would have easily taken down the entire Burmese army, this older, more seasoned model fights alongside – and eventually leads – the hotshot soldiers of fortune hired to bring back the missionaries, lending some sense of credibility (however miniscule) to the proceedings. Stallone’s choice of Burma as a venue for this outing is intended to provide us with a sobering message about a tragically overlooked conflict, but the Burmese army are depicted as an evil cartoon goon squad, carrying out one horrific deed after another as if reading them from The Big Book of Wartime Atrocities. Still, they make for a satisfying villainous force, and viewers will no doubt relish the manner in which the most heinous of them meet their respective demises.

While Rambo doesn’t exactly break new ground in action cinema, it walks the sort of turf no one’s dared to tread since the trigger-happy seventies, with real violence, real consequences, and real visceral intensity. It’s like Stallone’s opened a time capsule from the eighties and somehow made its contents seem not only relevant, but fresh in comparison to the wooden caricatures currently posing as action stars. Stallone proves, once again, that he’s the real deal, and it’s damned good to have him back.