Over 20 years after John Rambo hit the big screen, the Sylvester Stallone character still endears audiences with his guttural mumbling and thirst for bloody violence. That’s what Hollywood bet on with last week’s release of Rambo, the third sequel in the First Blood series.

Stallone, who co-wrote and directed, is back, facing a new batch of enemies. Gone are the eccentric Communist bad guys and insidious North Vietnamese rebels. Instead, Stallone must do battle with the malicious Burmese militia to save a group of American Christian missionaries.

The film opens with a montage of atrocities such as child soldiers, mass executions, rape and decapitated bodies covered in flies. Meanwhile, the real Burma is still in the midst of violent political conflict.

Bad taste sums up the premise of Rambo. “It was everything I thought it would be and worse,” Ryan Furlough, a junior, said.

The villains are Asian heathens; the good guys are Caucasian Christians. The evil Burmese General kidnaps boy soldiers, burns villages, is a homosexual pedophile and, most dastardly of all, has a Fu Manchu moustache. Rambo saves the only female missionary, a pretty blonde, from savage soldiers. The native Karen rebels cannot take down the militia, but Rambo and seven Western mercenaries can wipe out a hundred men in an hour.

The message in Rambo is that the only way to stop violent oppression is to fight it with way more violence. Rambo is as gory as they come; bodies explode on land mines, bullets burst through small children, limbs are blown and hacked off, Rambo rips out a guy’s throat with his bare hands. The only winners here are the hard-working fake blood manufacturers.

However, the most offensive thing about Rambo is that it has already made $18.2 million at the box office. Most reviews pan the film, “(Rambo) embodies enough jingoistic Imperialism to make Kipling puff up his chest with pride,” scoffs KillerMovieReviews.com.

The acting is bad, the sparse dialogue lousy and there are too many close-ups of Stallone’s leathery, scarred mug. Even if you’re there for fantastic violence, Rambo’s first half is too depressing. And it’s hard to enjoy the explosive finale as the Burmese are still in turmoil while you’re sitting in a theater, entertained by their suffering.

“It was pretty offensive,” junior Heydn Ericson said. “They had guns that shot the bad guys and blew them three feet back. It was way over-the-top.

“The commercial success of Rambo may be the first signs of a revival of a 1980s-style movie cycle. A cycle, explains Chad Phillips, visiting associate professor of theater studies, is a set of movies with a common aesthetic produced in a certain time period that are box office successes. Phillips thinks that most of the ’80s were consumed by blockbuster action movies, rather than thought-provoking films.

“Eighties’ films are all about excess and violence,” says Phillips. “Americans are always the good guys, even when they’re set in other countries.” Armed with increasing ’80s nostalgia and a current neo-conservative foreign policy, action film sequels can still churn a profit.

We’ve already sat through Terminator III, Alien versus Predator II, Live Free or Die Hard, and Rocky Balboa. These movies may entertain but they’re pure sensationalism without plot or craft. Dramatic performances and film artistry are sacrificed to get to the special effects and blood faster. Hollywood isn’t even trying to create new stories or heroes, just recycling old ones past their prime.

Do movie-goers really want Top Gun II: Electric Boogaloo? If so, I think I’ll just go bowling on Fridays nights.