Rambo IV gets incredibly more of these moments, for obvious reasons:
- The sickening brutality of the Burmese Tatmadaw towards the Karen villagers. The scene where they attack the village
contains so much horror in the background and onscreen that it becomes an awful game of Freeze-Frame Bonus to find them all.- More so when you find out that, unfortunately, Burma in the movie is not far off from real-life Burma. To twist the knife further, while filming on the Thailand side of the country's border with Burma, Stallone commented that the cast and crew got to see the brutality first hand.
- Major Tint, period. He's is even scarier than the ruthless Soviet Colonel Zaysen from the preceding film.
- One of the missionaries got fed to the pigs for looking at Maj. Tint the wrong way. We later see his legless corpse hanging in a cruciform pose over their sty, with the pigs still nibbling on the bloody stumps.
- The Burmese Army forcibly recruits boys to become soldiers. It suddenly dawns on you during the gang rape scene that those guys were probably pressganged at a young age and brutalized into becoming vicious, sadistic footsoldiers for the military regime. Then there's the boy who's left in Major Tint's hands.
- For added horror, what were the girls doing there? It would be bad enough if they were kidnapped in one of the Burmese Army's raids, but if they were taken at a young age like the boys, the soldiers could've... let's leave it at that.
- The ending battle is Bloodier and Gorier compared with the earlier battles in the earlier sequels. Worse yet, it's a lot more accurate to real life compared to the earlier movies; getting shot with an M2 Browning Aircraft, Rambo uses in the climax actually does far more damage to the human body than shown in the film. When Rambo surveys the damage he wrought, he is disgusted and finally goes home.
- Tint is shown to be a sickening child molester. We see in one scene (which could be deleted in the TV version) a young boy being brought to his hut. After stroking the boy's head in a very unpleasant way, Tint closes the door. We don't see what happens next (thankfully), but we probably don't need to...
- Rambo's Nightmare Sequence, which shows his traumatic past with footage from the previous movies, and culminates in Trautman shooting Rambo in the stomach and waking up from the shock.
- Rambo's throat rip kill, as satisfying as it is, is still incredibly brutal to watch.
- On a horrifying note, Rambo IV has the most disturbing case of Shown Their Work. How Burma is presented in the film is only the beginning. Like we've previously mentioned, the M2 Browning does a LOT of damage to soft and squishy targets. In fact, ScreenRant has an article that mentions the gore presented in the final battle. According to ScreenRant, some critics have claimed the damage done by .50 BMG rounds in the film is "unrealistic". ScreenRant states that War Veterans who have used .50 Caliber M2 Brownings in Iraq and Afghanistan beg to differ on those claims. The veterans state that not only was the damage realistic, the results were portrayed as Lighter and Softer than they would be real life. So basically, you've only been shown a toned-down version of what humans actually look like after an M2 Browning is done with them. Wait... WHAT!?
