Rambo

With Rambo: Last Blood due out in theaters in about ten days, Lionsgate has recently released the 2008 Rambo, aka Rambo 4, on 4K UHD. A few months ago, they had also released the original Rambo Trilogy on 4K UHD. I received a copy of Rambo on 4K UHD for review and it’s every bit as intense and impressive of an action film as I remember it being when I first saw it in theaters eleven years ago. Let’s take a closer look.

Rambo not only stars Sylvester Stallone reprising the role he first had over twenty years prior, but he also wrote and directed 2008’s rendition, and on a relatively low budget, too. The opening of the film sets the grisly tone of what you’ll bear witness to throughout the movie, which is to say a brutal genocide. It’s not easy to watch as you see innocent lives brutally taken in a variety of awful ways. Rambo, on the other hand, is living a peaceful life a few hours removed from the location of the genocide. Catching snakes to sell to a local snake show and forging metal goods in his shop, he owns a boat and generally keeps to himself. One day, missionaries from a Colorado church show up, seeking to rent his boat to take them up river into the hotbed of violence.

Flatly refusing for the sake of their lives, Rambo seems to have forced them to alternate plans. The missionaries appear to move on, but one of them, Sarah (Julie Benz) manages to convince Rambo that dying in the process of saving someone else’s life is worthwhile. She reminds him that, even though he has evidently lost his faith in people, that he still has a faith for something. With reluctance, and without accepting any of their money for the boat rental, Rambo leads them up river and they soon encounter Burmese pirates who threaten to kidnap Sarah and behead everyone else. Rambo dispatches these pirates and the missionaries ultimately get dropped off at their site, to be taken deeper in the area of medical need by a couple of local contacts.

Unfortunately, the druglord who runs the military in the area and who is spearheading the genocide comes to kill and destroy the entire village. He kidnaps the American missionaries rather than kill them, and takes them back to the enemy camp. A few weeks later, the lead pastor at the Colorado church that sent the team finds Rambo, and informs him that a band of mercs have agreed to go and try to free the captive missionaries, but they need Rambo to take them to the drop point. The band of mercs include an Aussie sniper, a former SAS leader, and three other skilled warriors. Together, with the help of the local resistance, the mission to free the captives and fight back against the horrible enemy army begins.

Watching Rambo today is still cringe-worthy at times, not in anyway due to poor acting or directing and so on, but simply because the violence is very much in-your-face. It’s grisly, it’s brutal, it’s realistic, but that was the intent. By the time the .50 cal rounds start flying against the bad guys, it’s hard not to feel a sense of full circle justice coming upon the evildoers. The film’s pacing, even in the nine minute extended director’s cut, is brisk, engaging, and you rarely have time to pause between one intense moment and the next. That’s not to say every seen has bullets flying, there’s plenty of that to be sure, but intensity manifests itself in other ways as well, such as the suspenseful scenes in the enemy encampment and when the bad guys force innocents to run through a makeshift minefield for sport. All told, Rambo is a very powerful action movie that captures the intensity of the character and the awful grind of evil and genocide very well.

The 4K UHD release includes the movie on Blu-ray 1080p as well as a digital code (that is 4K UHD on some services, be sure to check with your digital content provider). The image quality is excellent; presented in HDR with WCG, the technical quality is crisp and visceral. While not offering a lot of colors to ‘pop’ other than the muzzle flashes and explosions, and blood, it’s still an impressive-looking film. Perhaps better still is the new Dolby Atmos audio track that out-paced my own humble audio setup. The bullet and explosion sounds pack a helluva punch in this mode, and the sense of ‘being’ there between the rounds fired and the rainy scenes is pretty awesome.

The 4K release includes all of the extra features from the previous Blu-ray release, and I should note that both the Director’s Cut and the Theatrical Cut of the movie are intact. The list of features is huge — including an audio commentary track by Stallone on the theatrical cut, an eighty-plus minute ‘making of’, and a bunch of other features running typically around ten or fifteen minutes that cover everything from the music to the return of Stallone after a twenty year absence, to deleted scenes and more. My understanding is that nothing included here is new bonus material, but at least this bonus content is quality and worthwhile for those that haven’t experienced it before.

Lionsgate has taken one of the best action movies in the last twenty years and released a great 4K UHD version of it that includes the 1080p Blu-ray and a digital copy. Complete with an excellent AV experience and a host of compelling extra features even though none of them are new, it’s easy to recommend this for your collection. The only obvious hesitation I would offer is waiting for a complete Rambo box set that I would assume will be released next year that has all five Rambo movies.
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