Rambo: The greatest deleted scene ever

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:01:00 +0000

During the weeks running up to today's release of "The Expendables," Lionsgate has flooded the market with Blu-ray editions of its brawny stars' past glories. The centerpiece of this well-oiled onslaught is "Rambo: The Complete Collector's Set," which includes all the enhanced interrogations, decapitations and exploding helicopters of all four Rambo films. But even though Rambo kills 83 people in the fourth movie alone, this so-called complete set would be rendered an example of false advertising if it did not contain the Greatest Deleted Scene Ever.

From the moment that this big bundle of Stallone arrived on my front stoop, I had to immediately pop in Disc 1 of the "Rambo" set to make sure that this Holy Grail of extra features was there. I waded through several trailers and busybody intros, then found it almost hidden in a reel of other, far-lesser deleted scenes. Simply titled "Saigon Bar Flashback" on a disc that I scored at Target for seven bucks a few years ago, this deleted scene lays waste to all other cinematic outtakes like a shirtless Rambo squeezing limitless rounds out of an M-60 machine gun sans tripod.

“The Expendables”: Death of the old-school action hero

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:01:00 +0000

Waiting in line recently at the local multiplex, I witnessed a teenage boy point to the star-studded poster for Sylvester Stallone's action-movie throwback "The Expendables."

"I have to see this, just because it has everybody in it," he told his mother.

Obviously he had heard of Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- the three stars who form "The Expendables'" holy trinity of former gym-rat icons -- but what did they mean to him? The kid probably wasn't even born during the waning days of the Reagan and first Bush-era action movies, let alone the golden age of "Die Hard," "Rambo: First Blood Part II" or "The Terminator." Like others of his generation, he had grown up with a whole new kind of nuanced action hero, the Tom Cruises, Matt Damons and Angelina Jolies -- stars with a subtlety and self-awareness that Stallone and company never fully mastered. By jumbling this era's action stars with those of the past, "The Expendables" becomes an unintentional study in just how much the genre has changed in the past 30 years.

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Rambo: The greatest deleted scene ever

“The Expendables”: Death of the old-school action hero