Your humanitarian instinct is how big? Image: Lions Gate/Everett/Rex Features
The other night I went to see the new Rambo. That's the one starring the 61-year-old Sylvester Stallone as a man capable of running up and down jungle-covered hills for hours on end and tearing an enemy's throat out with his bare hands, yet still with enough sexual allure to attract a woman half his age.
The only real change from the Rambo of the 1980s seems an inability to take his shirt off (as proven in a recent academic study), but if you like your dialogue sullen and your decapitations swift, then it ain't that bad an hour and a half.
What's most interesting about the film, not only starring but written and directed by Stallone, however, is the choice of baddy. Namely, the Burmese military. It turns out the situation in Burma, a country which has spent the last 35 years under military rule and experienced a bloody crackdown on anti-government protest only last autumn, is a subject close to Sly's heart. So close, in fact, that he is said to have phoned up the Reuters world desk in London earlier this month and demanded access to a hack in order to relay his opinions on the matter.
It just so happens that Sly's moment of citizen journalism coincides with the beginning of a PR push for Rambo, but don't let that cloud your mind with a throbbing cynicism. Neither should you allow yourself to be distracted by the fact that most of the Burmese characters spend the movie running around slack-jawed with fear before having their limbs blown off or that the chief villain likes to have sex with young boys. For Sly has created a truly ethical action movie.
For 20 years now, Hollywood has struggled to replace the communist. Here was a villain so thoroughly deplorable that audiences felt confident about cheering when he got shot in the head. After iron curtains were replaced by velvet revolutions, that well-honed standard was suddenly out of the window. Many new villains were tried in their place but none met the gold standard of complete, thorough rottenness. Apart from the British, that is, but half the time they were supposed to be German anyway.
In fact, this was one thing 9/11 didn't change forever etc, because producers soon realised that while it might be nice to have Arab Islamist baddies in all their products, it was both kind of offensive to Arab-Americans and scary to all the rest of their countrymen who would rather not contemplate the thought of another terrorist spectacular if at all possible.
So it is that Hollywood should give a mass round of thanks to Sly and his increasingly immobile face for stumbling upon an enemy that can be loathed with everything an audience can muster. (Certainly all the cheering at my screening suggested a passionate engagement with the cause of the Karen people.) At last, a return to a guilt-free bloodfest. No more looking into their eyes, thinking "blimey, if it wasn't for a childhood free of indoctrination, that could have been me!" Bliss.
If the industry has any sense, and let's face it, it did release Transformers, it should roll out Sly's template forthwith. If 2009 brings Die Hard in Darfur, or Bourne does Belarus, I'll be first in line for a gutful of popcorn.
