My concept of Incredibad and why Rambo was a piece of garbage

I think I picked up the concept/idea of Incredibad somewhere off the internet a few years ago, the true coiner of the term lost to time and poor memory. As such, I have appropriated it for my own in describing a certain brand of movie. If you are not familiar with Incredibad, I personally define it as being something so awful that it’s awesome. The reason why this works to keep a person entertained is that your brain eventually realizes this movie is a piece of swill and decides to stop taking it seriously. At that point, enjoyment is no longer derived entirely by the story line but also in the execution. There is an invisible, unspoken ability for your brain to take pleasure in the undiluted badness of the movie. The plot maybe twisted and full of holes, the dialogue probably written by a twelve year old meth addict, the characters as two dimensional as card board cut outs, and the action so physically impossible that Newton could power several cities with the high speed spinning in his grave. But you don’t care once the Incredibad reaction kicks in; it has become part of the entertainment. If you didn’t have this ability, Godzilla movies would never be watched again and Mystery Science Theater 3000 would never exist.

Speaking of the green masher, the 1998 American version of Godzilla is a perfect example of Incredibad. The characters were terrible, especially that girl Audrey (Matthew Broderick’s love interest). The dialogue was an embarrassing mash of New York accents, but the movie saved itself by having a multi-story building masher as a plot device. The movie was great to me because not only was I twelve at the time, it had one of the greatest character actors of all time, Jean Reno. He’s one of the few people who make the French look cool, other than say the character Jef Costello from Le Samouraï. But I digress. Cool French special forces guys smoking cigarettes and infiltrating military bases with only gum and Elvis impressions? Gigantic monster crushing the hell out of the city and laying a bazillion eggs in Madison Square Garden? The military actually blowing the same place up? Word. Maybe it’s my age, but Godzilla was definitely a great movie because I didn’t let my brain think too hard about it.

Another relatively recent example is the movie Crank. Crank had a dumb story, dumb characters, retarded ending, blah blah blah. The movie was fantastic because it felt like the very celluloid it was presented on was dipped in a solution of speed and crack. The movie charmed me because it was impossible to take it seriously, allowing me to enjoy its quirks and weird direction as it happened. The most recent Incredibad movie I saw was Alien Versus Predator 2/Requiem/who cares. This movie did everything wrong in the “Good Film” checklist, but fulfilled all the requirements in the Incredibad handbook. The movie won me over because it refused to say no to any horrible act in the inane slaughterfest it laid before us. Children and pregnant women were equally fodder as were the stereotypical Jocks and People-who-check-out-dripping-acid-sounds-alone-in-the-dark. What was even more endearing about the movie was how they killed the female love interest of one of the characters and then ended the movie with the town being nuked by the military! AVP2 won praise from me because they messed with the typical formula of a horror/scifi movie and actually took the time to surprise the viewer. It was still a festering turd on a stick, but at least it let me have some fun. Then we come to the latest Rambo movie.

Rambo sucked. Lets just get that out of the way, so we all know where I stand on this issue. I knew it would be awful before I walked into the theater, I knew it would be horrible when I bought the ticket, and I was positive it was going to go nowhere near the "average" marker when the lights went down. I went to the movie because it was a Rambo movie, I've seen the first and second one and since I had nothing to do on a Saturday night I decided to go for sheer mindless entertainment. I was hoping for Incredibad, and only came away with a newfound need to discuss the very nature of Incredibad. Your brain cannot take every bad movie as Incredibad, because there is Incredibad and then there are legitimately bad movies. Bad movies have no redeeming quality and do not allow your brain to kick on the Incredibad reaction to save you. Examples of bad movies with little to no redeeming quality would be Multiplicity, The Hulk, and Transformers. Most Kung Fu movies would immediately go into the Bad movie sections if they didn’t have their own cheesy charm and/or fantastic fighting movies, which allows them to float into the Incredibad area. Jackie Chan movies are a good example of this, especially the original Drunken Master. The dub is absolutely terrible and I found myself ready to grind my teeth down to wee little nubs if I had to hear him whine and moan one more time (his primary word used in the movie was either OOOOOHHHH or AAAAAAAAAW). This movie was saved by the fact that the Drunken Master style is one of the most visually entertaining martial arts, especially when the acrobatic Jackie Chan is at the lead.

That was a bit tangental again, Rambo the amazing meat machine! Stallone was undoubtedly on human growth hormones, because he looked like a pork roast with biceps attached and held together by a sweaty bandana. He was the same Rambo as ever, reticent and brooding about his past while living as a loser in a sweaty part of Thailand. The movie’s biggest strike against it was the opening portions, the part where we’re supposed to get into the story and the struggle of the Burmese people. I can understand why this route was taken, because most of Joe Blow America (me, for example) are only aware of Burma because we’ve seen it on a map before and we wouldn’t know why certain Burmese are evil or not and why they are deserving of Rambo’s rage. There are documentary style clips of real footage talking about the sixty year civil war in Burma, and then the movie begins with an evil general forcing people to run across a rice paddy with land mines in it for fun. The whole thing failed to move my interest in anyway shape or form, because the writing of Stallone is just that bad (he acted, directed, and co-wrote the screenplay). This is a bad start, because this is supposed to set up the Rambo’s violent crusade later on in the movie, but all that’s happened so far in my head is “Huh. I guess he’s a bad guy.” It’s possible that years of watching violent movies and playing video games could have dulled me to the spectacle of human suffering but I don’t think that’s true. I had a much more emotional reaction to the cruelties of man in movies such as Children of Men, City of God, and Taegukgi so I think the blame lies with Stallone. The plodding movie continues in the same eyebrow raising fashion, prompting my brother and I to realize that this was a “pure” movie. Rambo had removed all extraneous features from every aspect of the acting and dialogue and made the result the very definition of cliché in action movies. There is no great oratory or development of character, just a stunted series of grunts and a poorly done flashback send us on into the rest of the movie. Every character was something you’d seen in a previous action movie, especially the trash talking mercenaries, which included a singing red neck and a verbose British guy who ends up dying. The violence is what supposedly saved the movie from being universally panned on places like Rotten Tomatoes, but I found the violence to be so over the top that I could even enjoy it, especially after watch Mythbusters. People were getting ripped to pieces by sniper rounds and machine gun bullets and I wasn’t even getting in to it at all! Everything about the movie felt like it was being directed by the mashed up face of Rocky screaming ADRIAAAAAAN and slurring out directions to his actors. Nothing really felt right, and I certainly didn’t feel the righteousness of his violence like in the first and second movie. Rambo failed to kick in the Incredibad because it honestly took itself too seriously. Usually that would be the ticket to letting my brain lean back in drink in the movie for the entertaining claptrap that it is, but I couldn’t. Rambo was a painful experience to sit through, ranking up there with Ultraviolet. If you’re lucky the fighting scenes will reappear on youtube or you can torrent the movie for free, just so you can observe the mind boggling mayhem. Just so long as you fast forward through the acting, and as fast as you can.