The Rambo Squad by Prospero Pulma Jr.

The Rambo Squad

How many men does it take to crush a drug cartel and topple the dictator of an island nation? A reinforced U.S. Marine division, exactly what a general will deploy since the target is an island. Or five men if Sylvester Stallone will have his way – Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Coutere, and Rocky/Rambo himself.

Calm down. Calm down. I know that you have seen those posters of “Expendables” that has an A-list of other tough guys – Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Dolph Lungren, Mickey Rourke, Steve Austin – but in Hollywood, you can conquer a bigger country, say the Philippines, if all of them take part in the action. But I can promise you several things. The cast is 95% male (not your average Joes but gun-toting beefcakes with anger management issues) and 5% female who are cover girl material (as to which magazine, you are free to speculate on). And the story is 40% dialogue (the characters have to rest between battles and talk, you know) and 60% bang, bang, boom, boom.

Now, let’s tackle the movie and it will be a short talk as there is little to talk about. “Expendables” is a film about, well, mercenaries or soldiers of fortune if you will. Sly Stallone is Barney Ross, the leader of a squad of mercenaries. Serving under his muscular wings are Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Ying Yang (Li), Gunner Jensen (Lungren), Hale Caesar (Crews), and Toll Road (Coutere). Oh, please. Stop snickering over their names, especially Barney!

Barney (the purple dinosaur is starting to play and sing nursery rhymes in my head) and his crew’s adrenaline-filled lives are injected with more barrels of adrenaline when Bruce Willis, as the enigmatic Mr. Church, offers them a fat contract to neutralize James Munroe (Eric Roberts) and General Garza (David Zayas). Fronting for the CIA, Mr. Church wants the pair dead because of their agricultural joint venture project, i.e., cultivating coca on the island. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Trench and Barney’s former teammate, waltzes in, recites a page of the script about letting Barney do the job, and exits. The church scene was one of film’s calmest, no single shot fired and no limb broken, considering the megawatts of action star power present in it. By the way, Mickey Rourke (Tool) has more speaking lines than Arnie and Bruce combined but he does not fire a gun.

What could have been an infiltrate-and-kill-Munroe-and-Garza plan becomes complicated because their local contact, Sandra (Giselle Itie), turns out to be the dictator’s daughter, Barney and Lee’s scouting mission goes badly, and Jensen briefly turns to the dark side when he attacks Barney and Ying at the behest of Munroe. Now, Jensen is the most dangerous man in the film for the simple reason that guns, attitude, and drugs form a very lethal cocktail and Jensen has all of them.

Barney goes back with his team and does what a U.S. Marine Division can do. After getting their thumbs sore from firing thousands of rounds and having ringing in their ears from multiple explosions, Barney and Friends save the day. Did I tell you that “Expendables” is 60% bang, bang, boom, boom? Right. I did.

-Prospero E. Pulma Jr.-

The Champ's Final Bow by Prospero E. Pulma Jr.

The Champ's Final Bow

It is easy to understand why Rocky Balboa ensnares viewers in a time warp. The sixth and final installment of the fictional boxing icon's life hits people not with a coma-inducing blow to the cranium but with a soft jab to the heart. The film weeps with Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) as he laments the loss of his beloved Adrian (Talia Shire), his estrangement with his son, Robert (Milo Ventimiglia),the disintegration of his umbilical cord to a past that radiates with unforgettable memories.
But before the movie gets mawkish, a stimulating wallop, in the form of a computer simulation that pits Rocky in his prime and the current and controversial champion, Mason “The Line” Dixon (real-life boxer Antonio Tarver), is delivered. The flashier Dixon initially pummels the Italian Stallion but he recovers and sends the present titleholder to dreamland. The programmed match ignites a wildfire of interest. Dixon's handlers see it as an opportunity to settle the legitimacy of their ward, who is undefeated against the patsies thrown at him but untested against old-school warriors like Rocky. Balboa takes it as his chance to prove that age never robs a person of his dream to fight one last time before he hangs everything. He wins over the skeptics-his son, Paulie(Burt Young), his best buddy turned brother-in-law, and boxing officials-and starts training for the exhibition bout.
Nostalgia is served in large doses as Rocky sprints on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Bill Conti's Gonna Fly Now starts to play before the film reverts to the present, where an over-the-fill Rocky faces a formidable and younger foe. In the ring, Dixon literally treats him with kid gloves at first, but Rocky employs his team's blunt force trauma tactic that convinces Dixon that he is fated to be baptized by fire that day. The exhibition game turns into a bloody brawl and ends with both camps claiming victory. Rocky gets to bellow his last hurrah while Dixon gets bloodied by a real ring warrior.
Rocky Balboa fails to knock out when it means to and sweeps people off their feet when it does not intend to. Rocky's big words ring less louder than his mourning for his beloved Adrian. His grief exposes his human nature more than his bombast about handling the rotten eggs that the world throws at everyone. And you have to pity Dixon, for he is like a pretender to his throne, a king with no crown.
An old man once lamented the lost age when sports champions walked the earth, the days before megabucks deals and intense publicity elevated sports heroes to the status of demigods, the days before profit and press releases substituted for sterling achievements in the sports arena. In Rocky Balboa, we become that old man who want to see champions in the mold of Rocky and not clones of Dixon, to have a champion we can call our own.

-Prospero E. Pulma Jr.