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While it probably won't win any awards, unless there is some kind of prize for most disembowelings or heads blown off per minute, Sylvester Stallone's newest installment in the Rambo franchise balances its gore with good intentions.

Rambo, Stallone's fourth turn as the iconic vigilante character, which he also co-wrote and directed, finds the muscled hero deep in the jungle again, this time in Burma. Home to the world's longest-running civil war, mass internal displacement, and rumors of genocide, Burma, or Myanmar as it is now called, is a country in dire need of regime change. Stallone introduces this in a brief montage, before letting go all pretense at serious commentary with the next two hours of standard blood-spatter blow-ups one would expect from a movie of this name.

Clearly, no one will go to see Rambo for its humanitarian leanings, but implicit suggestion that his film is about anything other than a guy blowing stuff up in the jungle is pretty ludicrous. As it stands, the Burmese people and their suffering are nothing more than a convenient backdrop for another mediocre shoot-em-up.

On the bright side, media, bloggers, and the rest can take this opportunity to succeed where Stallone has failed, using the press for his movie to promote a worthy cause. In the spirit, then, of action films and social justice alike, I suggest checking out The U.S. Campaign for Burma, The Irrawaddy, an English-language newspaper published by Burmese exiles, or the Guardian's leading coverage.