How does Sylvester Stallone answer charges that Rambo is excessively violent? With great indignation, which is of course the only way that his screen characters ever answer anything. "I don't think this film is horrific and bloody, because that's what war is. It's not gratuitous violence. Gratuitous violence is a guy dressed up in a fright wig with a meat cleaver, chasing teenagers around the woods for ten hours. This is war, and it's a civil war — which, as you know, is by far the most vicious of all wars." To hear Stallone tell it, he actually expects people to respect the fact — or at least, not fall down laughing hysterically at the idea — that he made this movie in order to call attention to how bad things are in Burma. "We did tons and tons of research. There's an unbelievable amount of material out there, literally hour by hour. It's almost a teletype of the horrendous things that are going on there. And it's hard to believe that it's publicised and nobody does anything about it." Far be it from us to suggest that one reason Stallone may have selected Burma, out of all the world's trouble spots, to turn Rambo loose in is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of widespread public awareness of the atrocities being committed there, which means that he's not going to alienate a huge percentage of the international movie market by painting half the population as a bunch of wilde-eyed sadists hoping that the next plane in will bring them a blonde missionary to ravage. (And it goes without saying that, what with everyone running around decaptitating each other, Burma itself is not considered a prime movie market.) Twelve years ago, another movie about a Westerner who gets caught up trying to help the people of Burma, John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon, got little notice from audiences. (Slipping into pitchman's mode, Stallone has called Rambo "sort of like Beyond Rangoon, but with rocket launchers.")

It's optimistic to expect Stallone to realize that tying his self-glorifying action fantasies to an actual political situation actually makes his movie more offensive than it would be if he were fighting nameless killers in a made-up country, or gladiators from outer space, or some other deserving adversaries. It's not the gore that makes the Rambo movies so disgusting — you can like it or not like it, you can lap it up or hide your eyes, but in the end, it's only a movie. What's always made these movies splash down harder than most flicks of their ilk is the way that Stallone mixes cartoon heroics with "contemporary issues" in a way that touches real nerves. 1985's Rambo: First Blood, Part II would have just been a feature-length G. I. Joe toy commercial on steroids if Stallone hadn't had the instinct to exploit national guilt about having "abandoned" Vietnam vets and the desire to believe that M.I.A. soldiers were still over there, waiting to be rescued. What's debatable is Stallone's contention that this level of manipulation makes his movies more serious, and less sleazy, than the Friday the 13th pictures. It's trickier than it looks, I'll grant you that. When Stallone was kicking around the idea of making a fourth Rambo movie back in the early 1990s, before Rocky V bombed, he was reportedly thinking of making it about "the environment." That was before Republican politicians chose to make global warming not a scientific matter for serious study but an issue to be mocked and used to beat people like Al Gore over the head with; though it's a more pressing issue now than it was then, to have Rambo take it up would have meant possibly alienating a huge percentage of the audience that goes to the movies to see stuff get blown up. It stands to figure that Stallone wouldn't want to be burned again, after the disappointing reception to the 1988 Rambo III. The 1985 movie had ridden the wave of Reagan-era anti-Communist machismo; President Reagan had invoked Rambo's name in response to everything from a terrorist hijacking to tax reform, and in popular culture, the two figures became deeply connected people's minds. But Stallone now says that the third Rambo film, set in Afghanistan, died on the vine because Ronnie stabbed him in the back by letting the Cold War end ahead of schedule: "Two weeks before the film comes out Gorbachev comes over and gives Reagan a hug, kisses Nancy on the cheek and now I'm a Red-baiter!"