How does Sylvester Stallone answer charges that Rambo is excessively violent? With great indignation, which is of course the only way that his screen characters ever answer anything. "I don't think this film is horrific and bloody, because that's what war is. It's not gratuitous violence. Gratuitous violence is a guy dressed up in a fright wig with a meat cleaver, chasing teenagers around the woods for ten hours. This is war, and it's a civil war — which, as you know, is by far the most vicious of all wars." To hear Stallone tell it, he actually expects people to respect the fact — or at least, not fall down laughing hysterically at the idea — that he made this movie in order to call attention to how bad things are in Burma. "We did tons and tons of research. There's an unbelievable amount of material out there, literally hour by hour. It's almost a teletype of the horrendous things that are going on there. And it's hard to believe that it's publicised and nobody does anything about it."
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