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It's Rambo. The pronouncement isn't my personal judgment -- chances are, I won't be seeing Rambo until Steve Jobs gets his hands on it, and perhaps not even then -- but that of Anthony Sacramone at First Things. Had I found Sacramone's post sooner, I would have linked to it yesterday. Although I let my subscription lapse a couple of years ago, I still read and enjoy First Things because it's one of the few serious journals of religion and public life in America or anywhere else.

Anyway, Sacramone is thoughtfully blunt in his review. A sampling:

This film subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge. There is very little dialogue, and what dialogue there is, is stupid and vulgar. The violence in this shameless spectacle is so over the top it makes Apocalypto look like Gumby’s Greatest Adventure. Rambo is nothing more than a sadistic gorefest: rife with disembowlments, beheadings, exploding bodies, severed limbs, tortured children, and raped and caged women. Stallone, who directed, probably intended to show the horrors of genocide and so bring attention to such a terrible situation as actually exists in Burma—into which he then drops a monosyllabic cartoon character who, after slaughtering scores, if not hundreds, of Burmese, walks into the sunset with a boo-boo on his shoulder. Stallone succeeds only in trivializing such nightmares.

Do not go to see this film.

And yet, there's more!

Speaking of movies, Thomas Hibbs -- whose new book landed on my front porch a few days ago -- has a great round-up of 2007's critically acclaimed celebrations of arty nihilism at National Review Online today.