What an odd bird is Rambo: Last Blood. I had to watch it—I’m an American male of a certain age, and I grew up with the Rambo character. But what this movie was, I’m not quite sure. (Also, I was one of three people in the theater, on opening Friday night at 7pm.)
In a film by Balboa Productions, Sylvester Stallone returns to his other signature role as John Rambo. Even more so than the last outing, he lumbers into this fifth film in the series, looking chiseled but stiff at the ripe old age of 72 (at the time of filming). Yvette Monreal plays a damsel in distress who must eventually be avenged. Paz Vega plays a character who is unimportant. And the rest of the cast are basically indistinguishable, cardboard demon-men who must be shot, stabbed, dismembered, tortured, or blown up.
I say this because that is what I saw onscreen. The IMDB page for the movie lists a few more characters, but I don’t remember them. (A sheriff? An “American merc”? A “rescue worker”? No clue. I guess they must have been there, but it wasn’t important.)
The plot is straightforward. Rambo is hanging out on a ranch, working with horses. Why is not explained. Does he just like horses? Does the ranch serve some function, other than as a place for Rambo to play around with horses? But Rambo seems to have settled into this new gig pretty well, as he’s taken to wearing a cowboy hat.
Meanwhile, Rambo has a niece. Or maybe she’s an adopted niece? I don’t remember Rambo having any siblings. Anyway, Rambo has been playing the father figure in his niece’s life for the last ten years or so, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting to go to Mexico to find her birth father. She decides to do this against Rambo’s wishes, right before she’s due to go away to college. Rambo might as well have bought her a boat and christened it the Live Forever.
The niece’s birth father tells her, without inviting her inside, that he never wanted anything to do to her. This upsets her, so her friend takes her to a nightclub to celebrate, for some reason. Six minutes later she’s been kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and sold into … sex trafficking? This is not entirely clear, because we never see her going away with any men. She mostly just stands in a hallway and gets involuntarily injected with drugs.
This does not seem like a very good way to operate a sex trafficking ring, to me. If I’m going to pay for sex with a prostitute, I’m going to be pretty disappointed when I find out she’s been standing in a hallway all day with a bunch of other girls, tripping balls, with one change of clothes, no visible restroom facilities, and she’s kind of dirty and beat-up looking. But of course, one of the cartel guys explains that the girls mean nothing to them … so I guess they just mistreat them for the fun of it? That’s why we call them the bad guys.
Rambo tracks down the niece’s friend and forces her to take him to the club where his niece was last seen and point out the cartel members. This part bugged me. I know Rambo talks pretty slowly, but I never took him for stone stupid. You know what I would do if some psycho with a bowie knife showed up and my door and ordered me to take him to some club that he’s never heard of? I’d take him to a different club, point out some guys I didn’t like, and then I’d leave town. For some reason, Rambo never thinks of this. It’s OK, though, because the niece’s friend doesn’t think of it either.
And then, for his trouble, Rambo gets his ass beat. This is the moment we call “the end of the second act.” He heals up at Paz Vega’s place, and that’s the end of that story.
The third act consists of, predictably, Rambo murdering everybody. Some of this stuff is actually pretty fun. I was worried that they would tone down the gruesome bloodletting of the previous installment. Sylvester Stallone’s director’s cut of that film actually toned down some of the gore. But no; if you’re looking to see Rambo turn people’s heads into a red mist, this is your film. There’s even an absolutely hilarious scene where Rambo chucks the decapitated head of one of his enemies out of the window of his truck onto the highway, like, “Come and get me, suckaaaaas!”
Come and get him is right. Rambo lures the cartel members back to his ranch so he can murder them. You see, Rambo has been building an elaborate network of tunnels under his ranch. We see this earlier in the film, but it’s never really explained. We can assume he’s some kind of survivalist, but all we see are the tunnels. No reason or purpose is ever given for them. But by the third act of the film it becomes clear that the tunnels are very useful for planting booby traps to murder dozens of people who are dumb enough to get lured into a network of unmapped underground tunnels. Everybody dies in imaginative ways, but Rambo does not escape without some damage himself.
We are left to ponder what all of this means. I have no answers. I’ve seen reviews that call the movie racist, jingoistic, and xenophobic. But while it’s true that there are a couple of shots of the border fence, mostly the movie has no politics at all. The faceless Mexicans in this movie are no different from the faceless Asians, Afghans, and Russians in all of the other movies. They’re there to die. None of them ever takes a break to call their mom.
What is different in this one, though, is that it’s a revenge movie. In the other ones, Rambo was fighting for his own freedom, or rescuing POWs from secret prisons. In this one, he just wants to get ‘em. Plain ol’ bloodlust. This makes it feel less like a Rambo movie than an installment of the Friday the 13th franchise, machete and all. Rambo doesn’t really come off as noble. Just a little sick.
The movie also looks and feels cheap. Judging by the end credits, it was filmed almost entirely in Bulgaria, with an all-Bulgarian crew. Apparently a few scenes were shot in Tenerife, Spain, and maybe Portugal had something to do with funding, too, but it’s not explained. So if this film is supposed to say something about tensions between Mexico and the United States, they nonetheless made the decision to shoot none of it in Mexico, and none in the United States.
I honestly don’t know why this movie was made. I think Sly phoned it in. It probably had something to do with Lionsgate wanting to hang on to the franchise rights, and being willing to cut Sly a big check. It’s not as good as any of the previous installments. I probably won’t watch it again.