So there were a whole lot of folks out there who thought that a fourth Rambo would be precious little more than a gigantic ego trip for its director / lead actor Sylvester Stallone, and ahead of the release of The Expendables, the folks out at Lions Gate went positively Rambo-crazy. Thus, they sent me a copy of the newest Rambo installment to review, and I’m actually pretty pleased with how it turned out.

John Rambo’s been out in the general vicinity of Vietnam for the last good long while now, and as such, he’s been doing odd jobs to get by.  But it’s his boating operation that most interests a group of missionaries off to do God’s work in Burma, which from the look of the movie is pretty much a gigantic rolling war zone.  And when the missionaries get captured by Burmese troops, the church that sent them hires a group of  mercenaries to go forth and get them.  This allows Rambo to get back in the thick of things, and results in loads and loads and loads of gun battles and explosions in the grandest Rambo tradition.

The really good part about this, unlike past Rambo installments, Sylvester Stallone is not called upon to try and run the whole movie himself.  Of course he’s the lead, and the hero, but he will not have a monopoly of screen time.  He’ll be sharing it out nicely with a whole bunch of other actors who all do at least a passably good job of keeping up.  The end result is that everyone’s sharing out duty, no one’s getting an unpleasantly large amount of time, and the action is kept rolling right along to a fairly explosive ending.

Rambo definitely surprised me by being a whole lot more than it really had any right to be–the worries that this would be Stallone stroking his old man’s ego by telling himself that he still had it were perfectly valid in their own right.  But what we have here is no mere ego trip, but rather a fully realized action flick.

Sure, it’s not without its problems.  Everything goes entirely too smoothly for Rambo and company.  The movie has a tendency to lapse into the preachy.  But as action movies go, Rambo definitely has a lot of explosive power to it, and it’s presented in a reasonably solid package.

Thus, since both franchise and lead have aged well, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Rambo a seven out of ten for giving us decent if a bit flawed action movie fun.