Rambo

Arriving in cinemas with its much publicised 236 body kill-count in a meagre 91 minutes of running time (that's 2.59 kills per minute) Rambo is the 4th entry in the franchise that started with First Blood in 1982 - a movie that featured a kill count of zero and was actually fairly highly respected.

This is of course absolute nonsense. No one's going to watch it for great dialogue, great acting or anything resembling originality. This is murder-porn which may very well be the new form of torture-porn, a sub-genre that became popular with the increasingly absurd, disgusting and atrocious Saw franchise and Eli Roth's two (despicable) Hostel films.

If torture-porn is repugnant (which is is) then why am I going to give murder-porn a (semi) pass (which I am)? The answer is maybe that the violence here has a video game/cartoon like quality that makes it possible to detach yourself slightly from what would otherwise be fairly disturbing. Bodies go flying at a rate of 10 a second, limbs flail, blood spatters. It has such a weak grip on reality that you find yourself amused by proceedings rather than outraged. Rambo even manages to explode a WWII bomb that generates a mushroom cloud (and then impressively outruns the aftermath) which you have to admit is a pretty neat way of dispatching multiple bad guys at once. And these bad guys are set up to be so evil that killing them doesn't really matter anyway.

It's very violent. It's dreadfully scripted. It's appalling acted. It's also very funny. I'm not sure it always intends to be, but it is. And for that reason it's almost worth your time. D+