Rambo

If you see only one film this year about a 60-year-old man disemboweling the Burmese, make it this one!

Sylvester Stallone's willingness to push the envelope -- and do it without disrupting what is, honestly, a masterfully paced and compact storyline -- certainly elicits a visceral response.

Sylvester Stallone and his character-creation, John Rambo, have at least this much in common: They're both easy to make fun of.

Rambo teaches that fighting sucks, good intentions can be futile, and coalitions of the willing are a charade: A man's got to do what a man's got to do.

As one dude told his buddy after a recent showing, "That was by far the goriest movie I've ever seen in my life." Then there was a smattering of applause.

Surprisingly, Rambo almost works. Certainly, this one fares better than Rocky Balboa, his sixth outing as the beat-boxer that hit screens in December 2006.

It's a brutal, insanely excessive successor to grindhouse pictures of yore.

Rambo is paradoxically both a condemnation and celebration of mindless slaughter.

Rambo ranks as the overall series' second-best entry, but in an age when escapism no longer serves as an easy escape, a movie about a one-man army makes for underwhelming odds against reality's horrors.

The word "bloodbath" tends to get thrown around at every garden-variety onscreen massacre these days. That said, Rambo is the closest you will experience to a churning soak in a Jacuzzi full of Type O-negative.

There's something oddly touching about Sylvester Stallone's march down memory lane, dusting off his most iconic characters for another outing after years in mothballs.

Those in the mood for mindless, macho mayhem will enjoy this brawny, brainless throwback to the Reagan Era.

Having revived his Rocky Balboa persona two years ago (to middling effect at the box office), Sylvester Stallone's attempt to jump-start the only other movie franchise that's worked for him may emit a whiff of desperation.

The fantasy is so over-the-top, the enemies so comically monstrous and their deaths so gory, that you may just throw your head back and roar with laughter.

Rambo is surprisingly effective as an action movie precisely because the villains seem truly dangerous and the "mission" truly a death wish.

By now, Sylvester Stallone seems to have accepted that his two lasting contributions to civilization are Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, and his new film Rambo is a product of that acceptance.

It's shockingly entertaining in the no-nonsense degree to which director/co-writer/producer/star Stallone goes for the jugular -- and rips off the whole head.

In Rambo, violence may be unpleasant and may not get you the girl, but it most definitely and awesomely wins the war.

Part of the virtue of Rambo is its simplicity -- you might say even the pristine simplicity -- of its formula

You have to give Sylvester Stallone credit where it's due: as a director, he knows how to stage exciting action sequences.

This Rambo is more profane than we remember and more violent than ever, as Sylvester Stallone morphs the aged, steroid-bulked action figure into someone who knows how to roll with today's young filmgoer.

Director/co-writer Sylvester Stallone, who also recently brought Rocky Balboa back from the dead, barely, struts and frets and (mostly) grunts.

Rambo isn't dull. It is, however, often murkily directed, a real shortcoming in an action movie.

Rambo is no longer a symbol of betrayal in Vietnam or anything else. He's just a walking Claymore.

There will be blood in the ultraviolent Rambo, a movie that depicts both heinous acts and righteous reckoning with equal degrees of flying body parts and arterial sprays.

The best that can be said about Rambo is that it makes last year's Rocky redux look like Oscar material.

Rambo is proficiently made, deeply offensive and undeniably cruel, like a popular restaurant serving fresh-roasted puppy.

The movie strains mightily to dress itself up in some kind of political meaning. And you've got to hand it to Sylvester Stallone: It takes brass balls for the guy who made First Blood Part II to now decry the senseless brutality of war.

With its first-person-shooter perspective and gun-and-run narrative, this one's for the PlayStation crowd. It's not a movie. It's an adrenaline pump and purveyor of raw carnage.