I made one of the WORST decisions of my life Friday.

I went to see the new Rambo movie... with my mom.

YIKES!

First of all, lemme 'splain.

I guess I got caught up in the hype. First of all there was this ridiculous trailer that appeared online a few months ago...

DISCLAIMER: Don't watch if you have weak stomach.



So, after being blown away by the "B" movie ridiculosity of this trailer I began to get on that "It's going to be soooooo bad, it'll be grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat!"

But then time passed, and my interest level waned, and then I started seeing these...



How come they made him look like Anthony Kiedis?



These posters are ALL OVER The Bay Area. And something about the idea that they (They being Stallone, I guess.) are trying to turn the biggest war mongering superhero of the 80's into a pretend graffiti campaign --- as if Rambo is a man of the people --- the idea of that struck me as sooooooooo funny that I thought, "I gotta see this."

And if you're going to see Rambo in the year 2008, you have to do it opening night.

I quickly put that aside when I realized that my mom and girlfriend. Melissa, would be in town (for my show and birthday), and I figured that there was NO WAY to convince them of that plan, birthday or not.

Well apparently, they REEEEEEEEALLY love me, because when my roommate Kevin strolled into my room Friday night and said he was going, both my mom and Melissa saw the lonely hound dog look in my eye and said... "OK, we'll go with you." (This was key because no other movie was playing at the same time that they wanted to see. DAMN YOU, MULTIPLEX! YOU PROMISED THAT WE WOULD HAVE MORE CHOICES THAN WE WOULD EVER NEED OR WANT! DAMN YOU!)

So we went to see Rambo.

Now, I know what you're thinking? "Rambo? Why is it just called Rambo? Isn't this like the 9th sequel?"

No. This is only the 3rd sequel. What you're doing is adding the number of Rocky movies (6) to the number of Rambo movies (4)... A common mistake.

And also this is the first one to be called simply Rambo --- Actually "Simply Rambo" would have been a good name too. --- Anyway, the first Rambo movie is actually titled "First Blood". It was based on a book about a American Vietnam War Veteran who when traveling through a small American town gets harassed by the local police and proceeds to... kill everybody.

Ok, not exactly Shakespeare... Actually, that IS eerily similar to many Shakespeare plots.

The book didn't have any sequels, but Hollywood always knows better. They didn't start calling these movies Rambo until the second one. And I guess this is an effort to go back to basics or something.

My review of the NEW Rambo... THANK GOD IT WAS ONLY 93 MINUTES!!!

I spent the bulk of that 93 minutes dividing my time among these activities...

1) Covering my mom's eyes. Not that she couldn't handle it, but I just felt bad being responsible for her taking this crap into her 70 year old system.

2) Trying to find some joy in a joyless movie. It's an action movie. Shouldn't somebody be having some fun?

3) Feeling sorry for the brown people in the film who had to be blown up and killed in ways that most special effects crews dream of. "Maybe we could have Rambo slice his stomach open, and then his intestines could fall out onto the ground?" This literally happened.

4) Wondering how come none of the Burmese bad guys in the movie actually got to have fully rounded out characters. They were just all EVIL. The leader of the bad guys, who had NO LINES, was even sooooooo evil that (HORROR OF ALL HORRORS!) he was gay... Or maybe the movie was just implying that he was a molester of young boys. I can't really be sure. I was too busy doing the next activity...

5) Pondering my life's choices and decisions. I'm 35 years old now (at least I was the day after the movie.) And it is time that I not waste time doing things like Rambo movies, when I could go see something equally violent but more thoughtful like "No Country For Old Men" OR "There Will Be Blood" or THIS GUY.



At some point at about around 5 minutes into this movie, I remembered, "Hey, wait a minute!.. I never liked the old Rambo movies. I was always a Schwartzenegger fan. When he ripped your arm off and beat you with it... it was supposed to be funny. Stallone wants you to take this stuff seriously. He says as much here in an article talking about making the movie...

"I was being accused, once again, of using the Third World as a Rambo victim. The Burmese are beautiful people. It's the military I am portraying as cruel,''

Well unfortunately Sly, it's hard to tell that you're on their side when you're the writer and director and you didn't give them one stinkin' line.

And now kids, we'll end with a reading from the Book of Hypocrisy. This is Stallone talking about his struggle to get the movie an "R" rating instead of an "NC-17" rating.

"This is full scale genocide. I want an 'R' and I want the violence in there because it is reality. It would be a whitewashing not to show what's over there,'' he told Associated Press "I think there is a story that needs to be told," Stallone said.

Yeah, Sly. There probably is a story about living in Burma that needs to be told. And it still does.

P.S. For the record the people in the 25% filled theater that I watched it with seemed to love it. One kid even cheered throughout.

P.P.S. Yes, they are already talking about a sequel. So, don't worry. We'll get to 9 sequels eventually.

P.P.PS. If they do make another sequel, I hope they get Anthony Kiedis to play to play Rambo.