Rambo's back, and he's bigger and bloodier than ever! Much in the same career-reviving vein as last year's spectacular Rocky Balboa, writer/director/actor Sylvester Stallone returns one of his most iconic screen personas to the screen, giving an entire new generation a proper taste of pre-CGI laden special effect extravaganzas. The fourth film in the saga of everyone's favorite Vietnam-era killing machine, Rambo is a glorious return to the barebones style of singularized hero action films that flooded the machismo-soaked decade of the 1980s, only now refitted and reloaded with enough testosterone to impress audiences grown soft after years of feminized, metro-sexual action heroes. Nothing personal, Bond or Bourne, but John Rambo would eat you alive and still have room for dessert.

It's within the steamy and hostile jungles of Burma we find our anti-hero after nearly twenty years of self-exile, capturing poisonous cobras to turn a few bucks and somehow avoiding involvement in the 60+ years of carnage of the world's most prolonged civil war. Things don't stay rosy for long, as a group of missionaries soon enlists the use of his boat to travel them into the center of misery itself to help the oppressed Christian community within. Ignoring Rambo's sage advice to just go home, the group presses on and thanks to their complete lack of understanding of the regional crisis, find themselves captives of a particularly brutal military faction. Needless to say, it isn't long before the group's leader (Ken Howard, spiritually replacing Col. Trautman) sends a ragtag group of foul-mouthed mercenaries down river to rescue his flock. It's from this point on that chaos ensues...and boy does it ensue.

Rambo isn't just the most visceral chapter of the series, it's on the short-list of most-graphic action films ever made. Both bodies and body parts fly through the air with ballet-like precision, as multitudes of enemy combatants are reduced to bloody hamburger in the wake of high-tech weaponry. Men, women, and yes, even children aren't immune to the proceedings, which draw equally from a mixture of real documentary footage and Stallone-directed carnage to drive its message home. How this film escaped the toxic NC-17 rating is beyond me, but comparisons to Steven Spielberg's tonally similar Saving Private Ryan are indeed apt, only you might want to use the Beard's flick to get yourself ready for this.

To explain the violence in Rambo requires a fundamental reworking of the English language - Rambo does not kill his enemies, Rambo explodes them. As wave after wave of soulless enemies are sacrificed to the gods of cinematic slaughter, you'd almost feel bad for their mothers had the film not so successfully set up their own cruelty in the first half. So thoroughly are Rambo's victims demonized beforehand that every nasal piercing arrow and disembowelment can only be met with cheers. At times the violence might seem a bit Over the Top (pun intended, Sly fans), stylized to the point of satirizing the very genre its attempting to give tribute. Plus, as in any good old-school action flick you'll find some well-placed one-liners and entirely appropriate humor sprinkled throughout. It's moments like these when all you can do is laugh, because it's probably the only human emotion that seems fitting when Hell is raining down on you. Yeah, it's that kind of movie.

Rambo may not be the type of film that wins Oscars, but it sure does know its audience well, and for that it deserves applause. Clocking in at a brief 90 minutes, the film could have been longer, but mercifully never over-extends its welcome. The only negative was the jerk sitting just in front of me, selfishly yakking away on his Palm Pilot and not especially considerate of those around him. When asked, he not only ignored requests to put it away, but held it higher in the air. It wasn't until I, in the spirit of the film itself, offered to insert the phone into a particular orifice of my own choosing that he finally relented and shut the thing off. My solution may not have been as elegant as a homemade machete, or as resourceful as some well placed tripwire, but it was effective. I doubt Rambo himself would have been as diplomatic.