“Rambo: Just when You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Jungle”
Review by A.O. Scott
Defense by James Spica

A.O. Scott’s review of “Rambo” is written as if by a chocolate lover who is trying, for argument’s sake, to expound upon the various points of its unhealthiness, only to break down at the end and concede that yes, chocolate is fantastic.
Scott spends most of his time in this review describing the great variety of absurd and overly-heroic happenstances that make up the plot of this movie. At several points in his review, he acts as if he is about to critically “smoke” the movie, but then turns around and admits that it is the absurdity or the heroism that makes the movie bearable in the first place. When he is just about to ridicule the film for its arbitrary setting (“Burma? But why not Burma?”) or the typical action movie hero fodder (“Mrs. Benz is on hand to scream, gasp, fall in the mud and huddle in a bamboo cage, waiting to be raped by the Burmese bad guys or rescued by Rambo.”), he admits that it isn’t so bad, after all. The largest of these ‘concessions’ is the end of the article, where he speaks about “blockhead poetry” (the second of two fantastic phrases in the review coined, it seems, just for this movie: the first being “cucumbersome”).
Mr. Scott, in a relatively brilliant review, by way of his almost childish excitement, prepares viewers for the guilt with which they will enjoy this movie.