Our old buddy Rambo’s got the best poster for a new movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a pretty good work of graphic design (I love how Rambo’s mullet forms the drips of a hasty paint job), but more importantly, its manufactured message blunders its way close to honesty, which is something we rarely get from movie posters.

The message

Rambo has been driven into hiding or captivity, but he’s still alive somewhere, and in the tradition of the post-Vietnam persecuted, he’s supported by underground outlaws. He’s a cross between Mumia and Mandela, says the mainstream multimillion dollar ad campaign.

The reality

They aren’t heroes of social justice, but I’ve got to believe Rambo’s got people out there keeping the faith, hoarding and watching Rambo VHS and DVDs since he fell definitively out of fashion when, as Jesus Jones told us, “The World Woke Up From History” with the end of the Soviet Union.

Still, with very rare exception, Rambo fans remain so in secret, because Rambo is pretty much as far outside of acceptable as any major mainstream movie character of the past thirty years.

He’s a homeless drifter turned from PTSD cop-killer to hyperviolent international patriot and hawk-crusader who worked with Bin Laden and the Muhajadeen. It’s hard to imagine somebody who would be liked less. And yet, there are still enough fans left to make this movie.

It ain’t Bansky, but it’s close, in a socially unimportant kind of way.

Now that the world has hit the snooze button and returned to history, a Rambo comeback seems downright poetic, and the poster, in its backwards, lazy way, seems oddly moving.