Rambo (2008) on Netflix
Vietnam veteran John Rambo lives in Thailand, catching snakes and ferrying passengers. Missionaries ask him to take them up the Salween River into Burma, where a Karen village needs medical aid.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.0/10258,535 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes38%
Trailer
Plot summary
John Rambo, a Vietnam War veteran, lives in Thailand, where he catches snakes and ferries passengers in his boat. Michael Burnett and his fiancée Sarah Miller are part of a missionary group from Colorado that wants to reach a village of Karen people up the Salween River in Burma and bring it medical aid. Rambo turns the job down more than once, and Sarah persuades him. Burma has spent more than fifty years at war, and the Karen farmers and peasants there live under brutal military rule. Major Pa Tee Tint leads his soldiers through the settlements, spreading fear. Rambo takes the missionaries up the river.
Cast
- Thomas Petersonas Missionary #2 (Dentist)
- Tony Skarbergas Missionary #3 (Videographer)
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Rambo (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Maung Maung Khin, a former Karen freedom fighter, accepted the role of villain Major Pa Tee Tint even though there was a chance his family in Burma would be incarcerated for it, because he felt bringing awareness of the Saffron Revolution was important.
- While filming near Myanmar, Sylvester Stallone and the crew narrowly avoided being shot by the Myanmar military, with shots fired above their heads; Stallone also described seeing survivors with legs cut off and maggot-infested wounds.
- Because of the film's small production budget, Stallone decided graphic violence was the only way to make it memorable, saying that fake blood was cheap so they should make it all-out bloody.
- The film is banned by the Burmese government: the ruling military junta told DVD vendors not to distribute it over its content, yet bootleg copies spread, and the opposition youth group Generation Wave copied and distributed it as anti-Tatmadaw propaganda.
- The Karen National Liberation Army said the film greatly boosted its morale, and some Burmese rebels adopted its dialogue, most notably "Live for nothing, or die for something", as rallying cries and battle cries.
- Odeon, Europe's biggest cinema chain, refused to show the film on any of its UK screens in a dispute with British distributor Sony Pictures over rental terms, and it was also kept out of French-speaking Switzerland over distributor problems.
- An early version of the fourth Rambo film would have adapted Charles Logan's novel Homefront, with Rambo returning to America as a DEA agent who has a daughter; Stallone dropped that draft and later revised it into the 2013 film Homefront, which starred Jason Statham.
- An early idea for the fourth film sent John Rambo to Mexico to rescue a kidnapped young girl; Stallone rejected it as lacking the essence of Rambo, and the premise was later used for Rambo: Last Blood in 2019.
