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He may be 61, but Sylvester Stallone’s latest Rambo film has a body count to dwarf all of his previous efforts as the war-weary warrior.

The fourth instalment of the Rambo films had its UK premiere last night and, according to the pedantic research of a Los Angeles Times writer, viewers saw bloodshed like never before.

John Mueller obtained an advance copy of the film and carried out a painstaking corpse analysis, comparing the new offering to the three previous movies. By his count, a grisly 236 characters meet their ends in the Burmese-set film, and not one of them goes peacefully in his sleep.

Death comes courtesy of bombings, garrotings, stabbings, stranglings, mines, artillery, grenades, bullets and incineration via flamethrower.

The gruesome killings more than double the body count of the last film, released in 1988, which saw 132 people killed, and more than triples the 69 cut down in the 1985 film.

But, compare any of them to the death toll of the 1982 original and they all seem obscene. Rambo: First Blood had a total body count of one.

Still, Stallone has followed the path set out by the original in another way. Mueller found that in the 1982 film, Rambo killed exactly zero people while bare-chested. In the second and third films he killed 12 and 33 people respectively while sans shirt. In the latest offering, the aging Stallone is back to covering up. Of the 83 characters who meet their ends at his hands, none bid their farewell while ogling Stallone’s once-famous torso.

Despite it being 20 years since Stallone's last outing as John Rambo, he performed all but one of his own stunts.

His star-power has lasted into middle age too. London's Leicester Square was awash with fans last night, keen to catch a glimpse of the actor entering the premiere.

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