Finally caught up on Rambo: Last Blood, the latest of the Sylvester Stallone Rambo franchise. A franchise that I thought Stallone ended in the decent fourth film where the character seemingly retired to a ranch in the southwest US. But, no, as long as there’s money on the table (and Creed/Rocky movies are selling tickets) there’s no keeping a good (or bad) Rambo down.
So Rambo: Last Blood picks up some ten years later. John Rambo is living a peaceful-enough life on the ranch with his teenage niece. She seems to love but not fully understand her uncle (and why he digs caves beneath the ranch) and he loves but doesn’t fully understand her either. But he wants to protect her since there’s only evil, dark-hearted people in the world (Rambo still has his scars on the inside and out). But when she finds out how to find her birth father in Mexico, she goes to see him against Rambo’s orders. She is promptly kidnapped and sold into sex slavery since that’s just what happens in Mexico. Rambo now has to use his particular set of skills to rescue her.
Yes, this movie is actually Taken… or a dozen other rescue/revenge films. And that’s the first of many problems with this movie… it’s not really a Rambo movie at all. Rambo movies are about fighting wars (or trying to recover from them). They are (perhaps simplistic, often jingoistic) action flicks about a soldier/warmachine who charges into a war zone and takes on armies. They are not complex geopolitical treatises but at least they aren’t your average, every day kidnap/revenge flick.
Another reason this isn’t a very Rambo movie is the acting and the writing. Stallone is barely putting any effort into making his character feel like John Rambo. And the writing doesn’t service him either… though, to be fair, he is supposed to be a little reformed in the beginning of the movie and then he descends back down that well and becomes the grumbling killing machine again by the end. But still… this could have been Rocky or Cobra or any number of characters Stallone has played in the past.
Now, it’s not all bad… there’s some genuine attempts at heart and pathos in the movie. It even gets a little sad at one point. They try – not super hard – to make sure we understand that there’s real human connection and love between the heroes. That is, until the grim, bloody finale.
But no amount of humanity really justifies the final ten to fifteen minutes of the film where humanity is the last thing on the agenda. Now, I liked Rambo 4’s final action scene which was gleeful wanton evisceration… blood and gore and body parts go sailing. There was something kind of earned and something just joyfully perverse about that film’s carnage. But something goes wrong in this film. The whole previous 80 minute run time is just a build-up to the point where Rambo has to defend his home from the Mexican gang… and this is supposed to be cathartic, joyful, gleeful fun at the expense of despicable villains who deserve the splatter. But it didn’t work this time. For one thing, the bad guys are generically bad but without any character or build-up. They might as well be zombies for all it matters. Yes, they are sex traffickers and that’s bad… but the movie fails to really give any one of them any kind of personality or character – they are just mindless hordes that we are meant to feel catharsis in their slaughter. I mean, I don’t feel bad for them… I just felt nothing.
And, boy oh boy, does this movie revel in gore as Rambo perfunctorily slaughters them one at a time. It seems to be the only reason this movie exists… and its filmed poorly in the dark. It’s just one monotonous, repetitive murky shot of generic gang member hunting for Rambo and POP he murders them. Wash, rinse, repeat. No set up, no tension, no nothing. Just a kind of ugly, sadistic, over-the-top moment after another until we get the final show-down… which is also filmed as a slow motion gross bit of human slaughter. This movie is actually distasteful… and I liked that fourth movie!
So, yeah, this is a dumb, bad movie that mostly doesn’t even feel like a Rambo movie… and when it does try to be one, it fails with a grim, dark, ugly action scene that can’t justify itself. I wish Stallone or the producers/directors had any real idea of what to do with the character after all these years. Instead they just grab a current boogie man in Mexican gang members and let true blue American hero – and indiscriminate murder machine – slaughter them all. Such ambition.
Score: 64