ONE of the more interesting recent exchanges between a filmmaker and a fan took place on the movie-geek website Ain’t It Cool News, just before the release of Rambo, the sixtysomething Sylvester Stallone’s second consecutive revival of a character he made famous a quarter century back. (The first was 2006’s Rocky Balboa, in which the ex-champ tore up his AARPmembership and allowed himself to be coaxed back into the ring one . . . last . . . time.) Not every movie star would stoop to an online Q&A with the unwashed, pseudonymous masses, but Stallone has mellowed into an appealingly self-aware and self-deprecating icon; moreover, he’s the sort of canny self-promoter who knows exactlywhere to find the sort of fanboy who would thrill to the idea of a Rambo revival.
Which is how he ended up encountering one “Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr” of Los Angeles, who posed a question that the hosts of Entertainment Tonight would never think to ask. In response to the news that the back-in-action Rambo would be taking sides in the Burmese civil war, the good doctor pointed out that “in the Eighties, John Rambo took on . . . the real villains of the day: ruthless, invading Russian commie bastards hellbent on global communism,” and went on to wonder why the Rambo of the Oughts isn’t “taking on the real villain of this day: extreme, radical Islamist bastards hellbent on worldwide jihad.” Noting, more or less correctly, that “all of today’s movies have [chickened] out on making Islamofascists the bad guys,” Dr. Hfuhruhurr demanded to know if Rambo, in his dotage, had gone soft-or, worse, politically correct.
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