Rambo: Last Blood – Review

Rambo with rifle rambo last blood

Rambo: Last Blood

Directed by: Adrian Grunberg

Runtime: 89 minutes

Last Blood, the fifth (and presumably final?) instalment in the near forty-year long Rambo franchise, is – to use a milquetoast contextual analogy – very much ‘a product of its time’. That time being right now, in 2019. It’s gratuitously violent and overtly cynical; yet also strangely affectual and emotionally resonant. Watching the blood-splattered trailer, you could be forgiven for thinking that this film exists as nothing more than R-rated clickbait for bros who want to watch Stallone viciously pile-up bodies in extremis—and rest assured, he totally does. However, I think there’s a little bit more going on under the hood of his farewell send-off to Lieutenant John J. Rambo. And as we reach the end of this current decade, it’s clearly a weird time to be a legacy action-film star.

Taking a quick look at the highest-grossing films of the year thus far, excluding Disney/MCU money-gobbling monolith features, we find two examples that correspond to the traditional ‘blockbuster-action-hero’ formula: Hobbs & Shaw (#7) and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (#19); films that already exist as spin-offs or continuations of stories and characters from within their own respective franchise universes. So, looking back at the stars of the 80s and 90s—aka the veritable golden years of action cinema—it makes sense that the last ten years have seen studio revivals and new entries in previously successful action franchises, albeit with a severe case of diminishing returns: Bruce Willis’ return to wrong-place-right-guy cop John McClane in 2013’s abysmal A Good Day to Die Hard, and Arnold ‘The Governator’ Schwarzenegger’s reprisal of a cybernetic-killing-machine-turned-babysitter in 2015’s tragic Terminator Genisys (the latter of which somehow being successful enough to warrant yet another instalment, James Cameron’s Terminator: Dark Fate, green-lit for release later this year).

However, the curious outlier in this phenomenon is none other than Sylvester Stallone. Despite mumbling his way into his early 70s, Stallone has still managed to reap considerable critical dividends within action cinema. After the success of Rocky Balboa (2006), the sixth and final film in the Rocky franchise, Stallone was integral in helping its spin-off gain traction, with both Creed (2015) and Creed II (2018) being financial and critical successes. In this period, Stallone also created and launched his very own cinematic franchise, reviving a love for 80s action and B-movie nostalgia with The Expendables films, turning his rotating martial arts/UFC star ensemble into a legitimate action film trilogy. He even managed to achieve the ultimate team-up of team-ups, wrangling in both Willis and Schwarzenegger for extremely brief yet roaringly-meta uncredited cameos in 2010’s The Expendables.

And yet, his forty-year tenure as Rambo has always felt slightly at odds with the ‘play-it-straight for violence and/or laughs’ direction of traditional action cinema. As a military-grade killing machine with serious PTSD, we’ve watched Rambo struggle with loneliness, isolation and abandonment across four feature films. Sure, once upon a time he may have been taking the fight to those dastardly Soviets, or liquifying Burmese soldiers with anti-aircraft rounds, but the spectre of Vietnam and its failures haunts Rambo endlessly. As Stallone himself notes, in a TV-spot promoting the new film: “No man is an island… that’s what I’m trying to convey, that even Rambo can’t be alone anymore. He really needs human contact, he needs love.”

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Which brings us to Rambo: Last Blood—a film that almost feels like three lesser films spliced together haphazardly into a somewhat greater whole. In the first act, we find John J. Rambo (Stallone) at his family ranch in Arizona, last seen at the conclusion of Rambo (2008). Rambo has apparently spent the last eleven years ranching, breaking horses, healing from his mostly psychological wounds, popping pills and helping to run the farm with his family’s housekeeper Maria (Adriana Barraza) and her teenage granddaughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). Think The Horse Whisperer (1998)—but switch out Robert Redford for a geriatric and impossibly stoic Stallone.

When the conflict does arrive, in the form of a doomed trip across the border into Mexico, Rambo and Gabrielle run afoul of the cartel and incur the ire of two nasty brothers, Hugo and Victor Martinez (Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Óscar Jaenada respectively). There’s also a sub-plot involving a reporter attempting to expose the human-trafficking cartels, but it’s mostly undercooked and irrelevant for our purposes. The tonal shift in this second act is stark and mercilessly bleak, even if it’s signposted at a narrative level within the first five minutes. However, when it arrives, it hits like a nihilistic version of Taken (2008) with the gore and consequences dialled up significantly. For his part, Stallone renders Rambo’s internal struggle here with as much gravitas as he can muster, even if he emotes with all the expressiveness of a granite cliff face.

With a concise runtime of 89 minutes, the film barrels straight into its third act denouement with all the subtlety of a hammer to the face. Bringing the action back to the ranch, director Adrian Grunberg (Get the Gringo) puts Stallone front and centre of an extensive montage sequence that’s equal parts ridiculous and extravagant MacGuffin set-up. The shit eventually hits the fan, as it always does, and the one-man army that is Rambo begins to dispatch cartel henchmen in a variety of creative and gruesome ways. It’s like an R-rated version of Home Alone (1990), if little Kevin grew up to become John Wick in aged care.

As the blood-soaked dust settles, the audience is left with some breathing room in which to ruminate on the purpose for all this death and destruction. And ultimately, this decision pays off when a slo-mo reel appears over the closing credits, with stills taken from the previous four Rambo films. Watching Stallone-as-Rambo age in real time, his face becoming more weathered with time, hurt and regret, dragged down by the oppressive weight of his exponential body count, we get to see the narrative through-line from 1982’s First Blood to Last Blood. “They took probably a young man, 17, who was already fragile and put him in a situation so horrible that he never recovered,” says Stallone. “It’s something that he didn’t ask for. The country did, and then basically discarded him. So, he wanders the world, this object of scorn, a reminder of a war that no one wants to think about, that he didn’t do on his own, he was asked to do it. So, he has this guilt that I think a lot of Vietnam veterans should not have, but our society was so cruel to them. And that’s the difference… he’s pained.”

The common denominator here over those forty years is right there in the title: blood. It’s always been thicker than water, and no matter what Rambo tries to do—who he kills, or who he tries to save—nothing he can do will ever wash that blood away. As the dark end point of the Rambo storyline, Last Blood succeeds not by humanising Rambo or his voracious bloodlust, but by showing the inescapable grip death has had on his life and the price he paid as a result. There’s already rumours of a prequel film in the works, which given the state of Hollywood today will likely get green-lit, however it feels wholly unnecessary. Through Last Blood, Rambo’s term of service has now officially ended and that’s where it should stay.

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