Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It seems we’ve arrived at the year’s penultimate Week in Review, and I’m still hard at work catching up on the year’s top shows. I’m only a couple episodes back on Chainsaw Man, and have finally started Orbital Children, but I’m probably gonna have to schedule some sort of all-day marathon for catching up on Mob Psycho 100. Oh dear me, three straight hours of inventive art design and gorgeous animation, what a burden. My own good problems aside, we also munched through a respectable pile of films this week, with our choices ranging from noir classics to some of the most unintentionally hilarious slices of propaganda I’ve ever witnessed. Let’s dive right into the Week in Review!

First up this week was Rambo: First Blood Part II, the second installment in the confusingly titled Rambo franchise. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this film, given its predecessor felt both conclusive and sequelization-unfriendly. First Blood was a bitter cry of anger and defeat, a pure expression of pain at the wreck Vietnam made of its veterans, and the injustice they faced when returning home. How do you follow up a film like that with any sort of coherent sequel?

Well, it turns out the answer is “you don’t.” Instead, you get James Cameron onboard as co-writer, set a course for Vietnam, and construct one of the most generous, indulgent action movies of the 1980s. Rambo jettisons pretty much the entirety of its predecessor’s emotional and thematic baggage, and instead sees its titular star in full action hero mode, sneaking through jungles and double-wielding assault rifles and sparring with helicopters. And while First Blood feels like an awkward launch pad for such a blunt-minded, violence-loving spectacle, the fact of the matter is, when you accept it on its own terms and divorce it from its predecessor, it’s as thrilling and inventive on a scene-by-scene basis as any of Cameron’s other classics. I highly doubt the Metal Gear franchise would exist in anything close to its current incarnation if this film did not exist; it feels instantly quintessential, the Platonic ideal of a “muscled-up dude fights his way through an entire enemy force” narrative. If you have any fondness for films like Die Hard, Commando, or Lethal Weapon, First Blood Part II stands tall and proud among them.

Our next viewing was Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which is essentially Andy Samberg and his fellow Lonely Island compatriots’ stab at a full-length, Spinal Tap-style mockumentary. I had my doubts as to whether the group’s comedy could be effectively extended to a film-length production, but goddamnit, those boys killed it. While individual scenes and songs vary in effectiveness, the film as a whole is riotous, acid-barbed, and even a little bit heartwarming.

Andy Samberg has more than proven his comedic chops both in musical and dramatic scenarios, and walks a tightrope walk throughout this film as star “Connor 4 Real,” who broke up with The Style Boyz (The Lonely Island) in order to launch his solo career. It is easy to hate Connor for his arrogance and idiocy, but even easier to pity him; buttressed by fifty real-world music celebrities singing his praises, it’s hard not to think that any fool would think themselves a genius in the context of the music industry hype cycle.

That particular strain of faux-spiritual self-aggrandizement informs one of the film’s best songs, “I’m So Humble,” which features delightful lines like “The thing about me that’s so impressive/Is how infrequently I mention all my successes,” and is immediately followed by Mariah Carey confessing how much she relates to the song, as she is the humblest person she knows. The one-two punch of Lonely Island idiocy into rapturous celebrity reminiscence is Popstar’s most consistent trick, and it employs it for punchlines ranging from T.I. confessing “I didn’t relate to that song because I have different things in my jeep than the things he had in his jeep” to goddamn Ringo Starr lambasting Connor for his idiot protest song.

Popstar’s jokes range from withering industry satire to gross-out gags, but like its predecessor Spinal Tap, the key here is that the songs actually work as songs. Samberg and his buddies take swipes at targets ranging from The Beastie Boys (“Me Likey That”) to Insane Clown Posse (“Incredible Thoughts”), but make sure their parodies are also genuinely catchy and well-composed. I’ve found myself humming a good number of Connor’s tracks over the past few days, and the convincingly Billboard-ready quality of these songs also enhances the film’s satirical impact. In this era where pop consumption is often framed as something between worship and activism, I’m happy to see an earnest plea for us to take stupid art a little less seriously.

Next up was noir classic Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum as a former private eye attempting to outrun some old debts. We first come across Mitchum in the guise of a lowly gas station attendant, but soon learn he was once contracted to return a dangerous dame (Jane Greer) to a wealthy mob boss (Kirk Douglas). Of course, Mitchum ends up falling for Greer himself, leading to a thorny tangle of plots and betrayals as all three seek their own happy ending.

I’ve seen a fair number of classic noir features at this point, and I think Out of the Past features the most quintessentially archetype-defining lead performances out of any of them. Mitchum’s fatigued investigator is the tiredest, most quick-witted gumshoe of them all, returning any accusatory salvo with a perfectly constructed platter of self-effacing snark. And Greer manages an effortless transformation from ethereal figure of mystery to unapologetic betrayer, turning her air of vulnerability on and off like a light switch.

With Mitchum, Greer, and Douglass all connected by a winding string of fate, Out of the Past offers copious scenes of investigation, deduction, betrayal, and counterattack, each lead wielding their limited information like a butterfly knife as they jockey for position. The film’s entire second half feels like Mitchum is presenting his case from the end of a pirate plank, always flitting a half-step ahead of his pursuers, growing paler and more desperate by the second. And while the film’s script is likely its crowning feature, Jacques Torner’s direction is also phenomenal, ably articulating the contrast of light and shadow that defines the great noir works. No stipulations or qualifications on this one – Out of the Past is basically a perfect movie.

We then watched a decidedly less-than-perfect movie, the recently released Christmas Bloody Christmas. This film’s raison d’etre is “robot Santa kills everyone,” and I’m happy to report that it does indeed offer a generous array of robot Santa kills. However, the path towards those kills involves a winding journey through the Christmas Eve festivities of two punk-adjacent hipsters, who are rendered in such realistic hipster fashion that I was soon ready to kill both of them myself. Given how little the events of the film’s first half inform its conclusion, Christmas Bloody Christmas ultimately feels like two short films stapled together: one an irritating and inconclusive young adult drama, one an over-the-top exploitation slasher. The second half actually works, but I can’t really say it’s worth the price of entry, especially considering the film’s frustratingly aggressive choices regarding neon lighting (apparently you can never have too much of it). You can probably skip this one.

We then continued our journey through the Rambo filmography with Rambo III, which continues the second film’s “war is awesome, actually” about-face into absurd, unintentional self-parody. This time, Rambo is tasked with recovering his beloved Colonel Trautman from within a Russian stronghold in Afghanistan. What follows is both a perfectly effective action movie, and also a truly withering sendup of the United States’ military ethos.

Not intentionally, of course. Every second of this film is Ooh-rah American Interventionism, to a greater extent than I’ve honestly ever seen in film. One of Rambo III’s earliest and most shocking statements of purpose comes when Trautman first meets up with Rambo, and attempts to convince him to join the war in Afghanistan. In sharp contrast with First Blood’s “America contorted its soldiers into inhuman shapes through its war in Vietnam,” here Trautman’s argument is that Rambo was born a warrior, and thus can only feel at home on the battlefield. Well, I suppose if people are just born violent, sending them to war can’t be too bad, right? Hell, maybe Vietnam was actually a gift for all those horribly scarred veterans!

Things continue in this preposterously jingoistic manner towards the point of self-parody, thanks in great part to Afghanistan’s particular history. Describing Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, Trautman sums it up as “Russia’s Vietnam,” admitting with a laugh that the United States have already learned from their own Vietnam. Given the absolute chaos we’ve made of the Middle East over the past two decades, Trautman’s words ring with the confidence of total ignorance, a hollow pledge to halt the violence America has forever and likely will forever inflict on the greater world. There may be people born with a predication towards violence, but they’re not soldiers; they’re reactionaries, bannermen of the conservative flag, and they will always be driven by a lust for domination.

Rambo III’s unintended themes drift from parody to outright farce as the film proceeds into Afghanistan, and finds the opportunity for some breathless praise of the brave Mujahideen warriors of Afghanistan. Stacked up against our current outlook on the Islamic revival and global jihadism, the actual message becomes clear: the morality of home-defending freedom fighters is entirely dependent on their position relative to the United States’ own, and the same people we will praise for their spirit and determination when assisting our larger geopolitical goals can easily be conceived as monsters of the opposition. Morality isn’t real; there is only the United States, and those damned souls who dare to oppose it.

In spite of its outrageously noxious politics, I actually had an excellent time with Rambo III. Rambo invades a mountain base and squares off with a whole army, he takes out like four helicopters single-handedly, and there’s a part where a tank and a helicopter engage in a jousting match. Given the altered trajectory of the second Rambo film, I basically expected this one to be drenched in Reagan-era martial apologism, and the ways it expressed its politics are so retrospectively absurd that I found them more hilarious than aggravating. Rambo III didn’t set out to be an anti-war film, but the contrast between its confident ethos and the joke history has made of its values basically does the job for it. What an odd, unintentionally biting film.