Word: rambo
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...Rambo CELLULOID GOLD Oh. Snap. We open on a jungle, somewhere in Action-Movie Asia. A synthesizer hums. A cannon fires, and we’re in a village where Action-Movie Asians are screaming and dying. But then we see those big, stubby fingers, fondling a tiny crucifix. And then come words that every voiceover-man would kill to say: “He is a legend of war. A soldier without a country. You know his name. And you know...” Pause. “...what he’s capable...
Heed the commanders on the ground, Bush told lawmakers, but that plea was chilled by the testimony in another hearing room. The war's icons spoke in person and from the grave, honored and pitied as heroes and pawns. Jessica Lynch was no "little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting," she told the lawmakers investigating what families are told about how soldiers die. NFL star turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman had not died a hero under enemy fire, his brother Kevin said, but died by friendly fire. And in both cases, the chain...
...attempt to beat the reader over the head with a political message, but rather a moving description of an army life reminiscent of the Vietnam War—filled with drug use and instructions to ignore the safety on a gun. One soldier even imitates Rambo, covering his face with mud and asking to take a rebel village by himself. For Beah, who describes the world through a fish-eye lens, the devil is in such details. But Beah has taken upon himself a topic worthy of aerial photography. Even though Beah has left the big-picture politics...
...opposition is just one person: the Erin Brockovich of decommed soldiers, a Rambo with a higher IQ - Bob Lee Swagger! With a surname redolent of American machismo, and Christian names that suggest both Good Ol' Boy and President Assassination Suspect, Swagger is your standard-issue outlaw hero. He loves his pet pooch, has little use for humans. On being offered the assignment to prevent an assassination, he spits out his apolitical nihilism: "I don't much like this President. Didn't like the last one much either." (As a non-voter for either Bush or Clinton, he's in sync...
...Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) could nail a gnat a mile away in a high wind. So he's just the guy to help government officials catch a presidential assassin--and then to be blamed for the killing in a high-level double cross. The film, which is basically Rambo with a higher IQ, is best at giving plausible instructions on how to assemble and detonate weapons of movie distraction. Wahlberg, so muscled up he looks as if he's ready to explode, is serious and committed to the action genre. He could be that youngish star movies have been looking...