A little over a year after the release of Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone has resurrected yet another of his muscle-bound, filled-to-the-brim with testosterone characters in Rambo. Though both movies starred and were directed/written by Stallone, Rambo falls very short of the standards set in Rocky Balboa. Not only did it fall short of the standards set in Rocky Balboa; it also fell short of any standards set in First Blood, as did the other Rambo movies. The one thing this movie was successful at was providing action. Intense, gory, violent, and nearly non-stop action. Rambo has become the definition of an action movie . Stallone wrote himself into a role that establishes the epitome of an action hero. He murders everyone and everything in sight without a second thought, and delivers action cliches like “Live for nothing or die for something”. Stallone was however only able to portray Rambo as an over-the-top killing machine with rippling biceps. It’s hard to say at what point the movie went from being action packed to excessively violent, but with an estimated 236 kills (an average of about 2.5 a minute) throughout the movie it’s probably the most violent movie to come out this side of 2000. The movie begins with John Rambo working as a snake wrangler for a snake farm in Thailand near the Burmese border. A group of missionaries approach Rambo and ask him to give them a ride in his boat up the river to Burma so they can do humanitarian work. Initially, Rambo declines and gives many long angry stares, but is soon convinced to take the missionaries up the river. Trouble strikes, and Rambo has to go in along side a gang of mercenaries to rescue the missionaries from the Burmese army. That’s the bulk of the plot, the rest of the movie is scene after scene of Rambo taking on a battalion of Burmese soldiers. The excessive violence in most of the scenes in Rambo make it hard to sit through, almost to the point of being physically exhausting just to watch another 5 minutes of blood, bullets and gore. The action in this movie tries to win the viewer over with quantity, not quality, and only succeeds at creating a drawn-out bloodbath. Although the battle scenes were intense, oftentimes it was hard to tell who was fighting who, and made the movie even more of a chore to watch. If you’re looking for a movaseries like Rocky Balboa did for the Rocky series, you will be sorely disappointed. If you’re looking for video-game like violence, look no further.