Ready To Rambo

Soon after Rambo dumps them off, the missionaries and the Karen people are brutally attacked by sinister Burmese government forces in a berserker scene straight out of Hieronymus Bosch (baby thrown into a flamethrower, etc.). And so Rambo and a team of international mercenaries go back and, you know, get them-- with bows and arrows (neck shots), knives (disembowelment) and a .50-caliber machine gun. Aided by the magic of computer-generated imagery, heads do fly, and in the final killing spree, actual doughnut holes -- holes that you can see through -- appear in human torsos.

Question: "It's one of the most violent movies . . "

Stallone interrupts, "Not one of the most. I worked very hard for this." Everyone at the presser has a laugh.

Stallone says he was surprised that the Motion Picture Association of America gave the film an R rating: "When babies are being bayonetted and people are being flamed, I thought this will never go." But he told the ratings board, "I said guys, this is happening today -- and if we're ever going to do something that responds, where art has the ability to influence people's awareness and impact the lives of these people, don't dilute it, don't water it down. . . . Don't cut away too soon. Let it sink it. I want people to feel it. To their credit, they allowed this film to be as truthful as it could."

Stallone is referring to the plight of the Karen people and the Burmese military junta that crushed the pro-democracy "Saffron Revolution" led by monks this fall -- after the film was wrapped, which manages to make Sylvester Stallone, as a kind of human rights activist, appear prescient.

"As you look at the opening credits," which contain actual news footage, Stallone says, "I had to live up to a certain responsibility, because people are dying as we're making the film. Therefore to just have me running through the film doing these extraordinary heroics I thought would demean what they are going through. So they had to have their moment, where you see a village decimated. In fact, it's even worse."

Meaning that he had to destroy the village in order to save it.

Stallone has been mulling a final (perhaps) Rambo movie for a very long time. Initially, the studios thought, hey, why not a caper film? "Like they wanted to have the corrupt CIA agent trying to sell plutonium rods. I said no. The biggest and most interesting crisis in the world is a human crisis. It never gets boring. It goes back to Shakespeare. It's man against man and their intolerance of each other," Stallone says.

Another producer came forward, Stallone says, proposing "this great idea where Camp David is attacked, and I said I'm out. It can't be. There's something about nature as part of the character, something about the primitive man, he's almost an Indian. Set in the city, I didn't think it would fly." Stallone thought he could place Rambo along the Mexican border, among the missing women of Ju¿rez, perhaps, and the human traffickers and wily coyotes. And then, "I did research and found that Burma is one of the great hellholes of the world. But no one knows about it. It's exotic and it's near Vietnam and the synergy was perfect."

What does it all mean?

"I don't know if it's coming across," Stallone says, but the message is "accept who you are, accept who you are, and finally Rambo does. He accepts it. I kill for myself. I don't kill for my country. Stop using this excuse that I'm a hero. I'm not. I got this penchant for violence inside of me that has to come out." During a dream sequence, which flashes on all the previous Rambos, this Rambo dreams that his beloved enabler Col. Trautman actually kills him, puts him out of his misery.

But no. "The warrior needs to war," he says. "Muscles are easy. Anybody can do muscles. You can do violence, violence, violence, action, action, action, but if you can find those little moments in between that connect with people, that aren't so physical, that's what takes the time, that's the challenge, that's what I love about it."