Recently, FOX NEWS’ Bill O’Reilly interviewed Sylvester Stallone about his immensely popular movie, “The Expendables.” As I watched the interaction between O’Reilly and Stallone, it was readily apparent that Stallone was cut from a different cloth than many inside Hollywood: he loves this country and he’s proud to be an American.
The interview took place because the L.A. Times took a critical stance against “The Expendables,” reporting that Stallone created it to promote “apple-pie patriotism” among movie-goers. When O’Reilly asked Stallone if exploiting such patriotism was the intention behind the film, Stallone laughed and said no. He said it was a movie where “good guys…take out the trash.” After pausing he then said: “It’s pretty simple, [if] you’re bad you’ve got to go.” Other than this, Stallone said the move emphasizes a redemption of sorts, inasmuch as “The Expendables” ultimately risk their own lives (on screen) to do something good for somebody, and by so doing, get “their morality back.”
As O’Reilly reiterated other criticisms that have been aimed at “The Expendables,” Stallone said he didn’t mind people focusing on the fact that the characters in the movie “are patriots” and “are proud to be Americans.” Stallone did say he had read some criticisms where people tried to say the movie communicated a veiled disapproval of our military and CIA actions abroad, and that it put the “focal point on our intrusion into other countries around the world” and how “we tend to over-extend our boundaries.” But Stallone shot all that blather down by saying “I don’t believe that at all.” (i.e., he doesn’t believe our armed forces and intelligence ops are running around the world making things worse rather than better.)
The highlight of the interview was the fact that throughout his time with O’Reilly, Stallone never once apologized or used the language of appeasement in response to the L.A. Times and other critics. Instead, he actually said he wasn’t going to apologize for seeming pro-American “because America apologizes too much.”
On my media player, I replayed Stallone saying “America apologizes too much” about fifteen times. I then found myself standing in my office with my fists in the air chanting “Rocky, Rocky, Rocky…”
Thank you Sylvester Stallone for being a real American.