9 Violent Mainstream Movie Scenes That Went Too Far

4. Relentless Machine Gun Carnage - Rambo

This entire article could be about how off-base the fourth installment in the Rambo series turned out to be. 2008's Rambo was war porn cranked up to the highest decibel level. Whereas the original First Blood painted a picture of war-induced psychological trauma by using violence as a canvas, Rambo says "f*ck all that" and pulls the brain right out of its skull, chucking it through the air like a grenade.

There's no doubt that every Rambo movie needs violence. It is, after all, built into the very DNA of our titular anti-hero. But does any movie need this much violence? It wouldn't be such a problem if the frequent orgies of bloodshed didn't feel like obvious attempts to pad out the runtime to make it a feature-length film, instead of the half hour of overwrought, mumbled dialogue it would have been otherwise.

Gore enthusiasts will find the extended sequence of Rambo mowing down his adversaries with a truck-mounted machine gun a scene worthy to be looped, but everyone else will either be covering their eyes or checking their watches. The fight in the middle of all this that has a pacifist bash an enemy's brains in to save his friends life takes all of 20 seconds, and is a much more effective use of violence.