Muscles + Money = Excess RAMBO III

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

You can amuse yourself with the film's budget, which some say was $63 million -- with about a quarter of that going to Sylvester Stallone. The producers insist that the excess was nowhere near so wretched, but Rambo III is still probably among the most expensive movies in history. So you naturally get to thinking that for such an investment the filmmakers ought to be able to come up with some scenery or spectacle more entrancing than sun and firelight glinting off Sly Stallone's ever rippling muscles.

Or you can amuse yourself with the mythology. Once, history tells us, entire societies were organized around warrior cults. The leaders were austere fellows like John Rambo, who kept to themselves, refusing to acknowledge pain or break training. They must have indulged in such mundane activities as sleep, sex and food, but never in front of the peasants.

The cults are all gone now, and all that is left is Rambo, here coming around for the third time. This lone figure -- pushed to the social margin, lost in self-absorption -- is apparently capable of awakening and satisfying an atavistic yearning for heroic purity in so many hearts that he is, in movie terms, cost effective no matter what the price.

What few are likely to find amusing is Rambo III's story line. For a novelty, the superhero this time is discovered not aroil but tranquil, living in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. Sure, he occasionally indulges in the local sport of stick fighting to keep in trim, but mostly he enjoys the silence and the sunsets. When his mentor and only friend, Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna), is captured by a particularly disagreeable Soviet officer while trying to aid the Afghan rebels, Rambo is recalled to primitive business as usual. There are, of course, low cunning, high explosives and much running around without a shirt, punctuated with other familiar gambits: torture scenes; the self-cauterization of, and instant recovery from, a wound large enough to stop an elephant; and a grimly preposterous two-man stand against a tank-led army.

And, of course, many, many close-ups of the star, whose expressive range, never very wide, has now narrowed to an all-purpose mask. Stallone seems to feel that facial muscles are the only ones that do not require constant workouts. It's the same way with conversation, which he obviously worries might interrupt the awed contemplation of his beauty. A lowball estimate indicates that, not counting grunts and groans, the star collected about $500,000 per spoken sentence on this film. All this staring and gawking somewhat slows the action, which is more crudely orchestrated than in the previous Rambo adventures.

Rambo III will collect a certain amount of contempt for projecting, at this ! late date, a ludicrous cold war stereotype -- the Soviet as gibbering sadist -- and a certain amount of comment for going into release just as the Soviets are withdrawing from Afghanistan. But what is the spirit of glasnost compared with the needs of a successful actor's ego and his fans' expectations? Somebody has to keep the priorities straight around here.