RAMBO IV Plot Points Revealed!!

Merrick here...

Entertainment Weekly has revealed what appears to be the premise finally settled on for RAMBO IV (that IV is a "4", not short hand for "intravenous drip") via an interview with Stallone.

The project has been in development for a very long time and been through multiple permutations (at one point Rambo was a family man whose daughter gets kidnapped, for example).

Here's what they're going with now, although I should point out that several previous itterations of the film seemed equally as certain at some point.

Not a ton of detail, but here’s the gist of it:

So, the script that emerged — a ''first draft'' Stallone has written with Art Monterastelli (The Hunted) — finds Rambo living a monastic lifestyle in Bangkok and salvaging old PT boats and tanks for scrap metal. (''It's like he's stripping himself down,'' says the actor, pensively. ''That old piece of military equipment.'') When a group of volunteers bringing supplies into Burma disappears, a relative of one of the missing missionaries begs Rambo to find them. He heads off with a team of young guns, a plot point required by the financiers, who wanted to hedge against Rambo's possible mono-generational appeal.

Interesting.

So, Bruce Willis’ John McClane has a young sidekick in DIE HARD 4.0 (or whatever they finally decided to call it), and now Stallone has a gaggle of ‘em for RAMBO? If Arnie comes back for another TERMINATOR film, maybe we’ll get “Terminator Teens”...or “The Cyberdyne Seven”?

I have mixed feelings about all this issue. Part of me understands the need to appeal to a younger dynamic for demographic and marketing reasons. But, another part of me feels that a vast majority of people attending these films will be folks who were big on the franchises back in the day…folks who may find the presence of young sidekicks formulaic and distracting. I tend to lean towards the later philosophy.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion on recent Stallone-related Talkbacks about whether or not Sly is “too old” to be reprising the roles of either John Rambo, or ROCKY BALBOA (which will be released this Christmas). While I personally think dropping in on Rocky makes more sense after all these years, revisiting either role could be compelling as long as “real time” aging is factored in. This was, after all, one of the driving emotional through lines for James T. Kirk in STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN; it was an ingenious conceit that profoundly affected our view of (and the breadth of) the character. A similar approach might work well with Sly’s guys.

Which, evidently, is precisely what Stallone is doing.

You can read the entire EW article HERE.