DVD Release Date:  May 27, 2008
Theatrical Release Date:  January 25, 2008
Rating:  R (for strong graphic bloody violence, sexual assaults, grisly images and language)
Genre:  Action
Run Time:  93 min.
Director:  Sylvester Stallone
Actors:  Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze, Matthew Marsden, Graham McTavish, Jake LaBotz, Ken Howard

Many viewers of a certain age—my age (37), to be exact—grew up watching 1980s action movies starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Some may, as they’ve aged, still harbor fond memories of these early movie experiences. For others, however, embarrassment has set in as they’ve grown older. The humorous one-liners delivered by the various action stars have lost whatever impact they once had, and the overall weakness of many of these films (there are some exceptions, such as the Terminator and Alien films, which have held up remarkably well) are glaring to wiser eyes. Worst of all is the excessive violence of these films, with nameless victims piled up and quickly forgotten, if they ever registered to begin with.

For Christians, who believe that God’s image is in all men, such mass destruction of human life is difficult to dismiss or contextualize as a form of entertainment, all the more so because our spiritual brothers and sisters have been, and are being, persecuted around the globe, and we all are called to suffer to some degree. As the Apostle Paul puts it, we are “persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor. 4: 8-11).

The new film Rambo, directed by and starring Sylvester Stallone, presents an interesting case study on the idea of suffering, but that’s as far as the interest in this film goes. Following his successful revival of the Rocky franchise last year with the generally well received Rocky Balboa, Stallone has re-launched the series about his second most famous persona—John Rambo, a troubled Vietnam vet who has a hard time overcoming his killer instincts.

Introduced in the 1982 film First Blood, today’s Rambo lives in Thailand, hunting his own food and running a river boat. A loner, he rejects a group of medical missionaries who want to hire him to take them into war-torn Burma—part of the church’s pan-Asian ministry. The cruelty of the Burmese warlords includes machine-gunning villagers and sending prisoners into mine-filled rivers. If the prisoners make it across the river without stepping on a mine, they’re shot dead.