Perusing Cinematical and ComingSoon recently I came across these on-set photos from the next installment of the Rambo series, yet another action series I considered long dead (not dead meaning "irrelevant," dead meaning "completed"). For a 62-year-old man, Sylvester Stallone looks pretty good, but beyond that I find myself perplexedly asking the same question I wondered when Sly's old-man Rocky Balboa movie came out last year: Do we really need another one of these?
Between Rambo, Rocky, the most recent Die Hard movie, and now even Indiana Jones, it’s like these action heroes who were played by the young and spry versions of these men in the 1980s just want to keep their series gasping along (and, of course, want to keep getting paid), but at what point does this all become an embarrassing joke? When their wrinkles are distracting? When they can’t get around without a cane?
Is it worth resurrecting these characters and story lines in order to relive some nostalgic sentiment we might still have toward these movies? Why can't we just let the action heroes live on in our memories, rather than have them make endless quips about how much harder it is to disarm a bomb with arthritic fingers or run away from a giant boulder with a heart murmur?
