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When his adopted niece is kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and forced into prostitution, ex-green beret John J Rambo creaks out of his easy chair and heads towards the border to rescue her and murder anyone who looks at him funny.
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Adriana Barraza, Yvette Monreal
Written by Sylvester Stallone, Matthew Cirulnick
Produced by Avi Lerner, Kevin King Templeton, Yariv Lerner, Les Weldon
Duration 89 minutes
And so it was in the Year of Our Lord 2019 AD that we finally concluded the epic saga of John Rambo, the beloved character who millions, nay, billions had taken into their hearts throughout decades of adventures. Finally, stripping away the layers of this complex man to give humanity a profound insight into the psyche of a true icon of cinema.
Uh, wait a minute …
Is Rambo really so beloved? What do we actually know about him? OK, let's see ... he fought in Vietnam and came home with PTSD. He wandered into a small town and got run out by the mean sheriff into the woods, where he was forced into waging his own survivalist war. Later, he returned to Vietnam to rescue American POWs and ‘win this time’; not long after that, he teamed up with the Taliban (not evil, yet) to fight the Russians ( … no comment) in the Afghan desert. Then, after a two-decade gap, he took his sullen and increasingly rubbery face deep into the Burmese wilderness to rescue a group of Christian evangelists by blowing mercenaries’ limbs off with bursts from a 50-cal machine gun. Finally, he rested for another 10 years before popping up in a fifth movie – more about which in a minute.
But who exactly is John Rambo? Do we really know him the way we do, say, Rocky Balboa? No. No, we do not. He’s not a person, he’s a punchline; a byword for Reagan-era excess and American jingoism. Rambo has no personality and certainly no sense of humour. His one facial expression is a fixed stoic grimace, coming from not being able to process how his undying love for his country has only ever been met with betrayal.
Even Stallone himself – who although not the character’s creator (that would be David Morrell for his novel First Blood) did at least adopt him, taking writing credits on each instalment and directing the fourth – eventually stopped taking Rambo seriously. Witness this exchange from 1989’s TANGO & CASH, released only a year after RAMBO III (Stallone plays Tango):
Local cop: "This guy thinks he's Rambo."
Tango: "Rambo … is a pussy."
Nevertheless, Sly
kept returning to the old soldier after that, first with the bluntly named and
staggeringly violent RAMBO and then latterly in LAST BLOOD, with which Stallone
intended to give the character a proper send-off. Well, I assume that was what motivated him,
rather than wanting to add an extra wing to his Beverly Hills mansion or
anything like that.
So how did Stallone decide to deliver this Rambo requiem? Well, as I was watching it, something was really nagging at me. I kept being reminded of another film, but I could never quite put my finger on what that was. Perhaps a closer examination of LAST BLOOD’S plot will shed some light:
After his loved-one is TAKEN in Mexico by a sex-trafficking ring, Rambo decides that he has TAKEN enough shit, and, having TAKEN his daily meds, decides that everything will be better once he has TAKEN himself across the border and TAKEN her back.
Hmm. It’s unclear why Sly felt compelled to resurrect one of his most iconic characters just to make his own ‘old dude steps up to fight and is better at it than we might have expected’ movie. There's a certain novelty when non-tough guys and character actors do this, like Sean Penn (THE GUNMAN) or Bob Odenkirk (NOBODY) or even Liam Nesson himself, once upon a time. But putting an established action star into what is by now a stale and tired sub-genre (the first TAKEN came out back in 2008) just seems pointless.
Which, sadly, is the most accurate way to describe RAMBO: LAST BLOOD: there really is no point to it. The previous movie already ended the saga of John J fittingly, with the big guy finally returning to the family ranch back in Arizona and its mailbox marked ‘R Rambo’. ( … Rocky Rambo?)
LAST BLOOD doesn’t feel like a RAMBO movie, either. The previous instalments may have been increasingly over-the-top, but they did strive for some level of realism, or at least plausibility. This one has a septuagenarian excavating a replica of the Cu Chi tunnels all by himself (possibly not the best way to move on from the Vietnam War?) and then fashioning booby traps that would make Kevin McAllister squirm. Added to this, entries one to four were, at heart, ‘issues’ movies – they were actually about something, regardless of how gung-ho their approach may have been. The only issue here is whether Rambo can still kill everyone without getting a hernia.
None of this would matter if the
movie landed. But sadly, despite bringing all the gory and inventive
kills we came for, the result is grim, ugly and unpleasant.
I definitely have a lot of respect for Sylvester Stallone. How many stars have developed three franchises for themselves on both sides of the camera, including a brand new one in THE EXPENDABLES at 64 years old? You could argue it’s actually four with the ESCAPE PLAN series (its lead’s age when the first entry was released: 67), although I don’t count that one since it’s strictly an acting gig only.
But you have to know when it’s time to put a horse out to pasture. When it comes to John Rambo, ‘last’ really should mean that we won’t ever see him again.
Two stars out of five.
Valid use of the
word ‘last’? I certainly bloody hope so.
What would a movie called RAMBO:
FIRST BLOOD be about? No need to speculate.
Next time: THE LAST POSSE
Check out my books: Jonathanlastauthor.com
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