The Gun of Rambo: The Hopeless Film for our Terminal Phase of Terrestrial Life

When my buddy first handed me a DVD copy of this movie, I was already trying to map out how I was going to have to pretend I liked it just to be polite and not snobby. Half an hour into the movie, my suspicions of crappiness were confirmed, as it seemed like I was watching a badly written, badly acted movie that was making the sale of munitions look, well, kinda sexy. The offensivest of the offensive. I was, at this time, enjoying my moments with Ethan Hawke - who I still think should have been cast lead - but that was about all the enjoyment there was, I felt I was near stopping the movie midway through to watch an episode of The Prisoner from my new complete box set (thanks Marshall!).

Fortunately, the film kept me just barely interested enough to keep going, and then - bait and switch! It wasn't what we'd thought. The film, underneath some dark (very dark) comedy (very comedic) moments, started to exude a sense of deep sorrow. By the end, this is overt, and Cage, lo and behold, is not the hero, in what turns out to be a scathing and impressively thorough examination of the arms trade. Though it sometimes hits us over the head, the politics are, at worst, sound, and the whole Goodfellas-esque set-up at the beginning was an intentional test. It sets up certain expectations that somehow force us to look frankly at real world issues, because we weren't expecting them.

And here I was thinking Nicholas Cage (excepting certain Spike Jonze forays) demanded that a movie not be intelligent before signing the contract!

In any case, the acting is bad, and the writing is, let's say, mediocre. Worse still, the movie is as close to anti-hope as you can get. But what can you expect in 2006 right? When you really think about it, there are probably only a few organisms that have much chance of being able to survive on the earth in 200 years, and we should be trying to expand that number rather than trying to save ourselves, a hopeless goal at this point. In it's own way, Lord of War reminds us of this. So I guess what I'm saying is it's a great date movie to cuddle up to on Valentine's Day, with some cocoa and some nice warm Ugg boots on your feet.