Rambo: Last Blood (2019) - Movie Review

Rambo is one of the most classic action franchises of all time. It is seriously weird thinking about just how influential the first two entries are, setting the tone for a lot of action cinema to come out of post-Vietnam America. The first remains one of the most brutal depictions of PTSD to make it to the big screen, and the second basically set the blueprint for every jungle-set military action-thriller to come after, up to and including the also-highly-influential Predator.

The third film… exists, and even as someone who takes pride in recollecting pop culture minutiae, I can barely remember anything about it. Then there was Rambo ’08, which boosted the gore standard in a way that, given what it was depicting, must’ve hit close to home considering it went on to inspire real-life Burmese freedom fighters. Following any of that up was gonna be a hard ask, and what we get here is… complicated.

Each Rambo film can be seen as a reaction to the real world at the time, whether it’s the Vietnam angst of the first two, the Soviet War in the third, or Burmese civil war in the fourth. With the fifth, it’s to do with Mexican prostitution rackets and Rambo needing to rescue his surrogate niece Gabriela from them. If topical quotes to do with walls and shitholes and all persons of a given country being rapists are coming to mind, you have some idea how this reads on the big screen. This isn’t helped by the notion of how Gabriela is (mostly) fine living in the Rambo horse ranch in the good ol’ U.S. of A., but as soon as she tries to reconnect with her Mexican heritage, it all goes to shit.

But quite frankly, that ends up being a minor point next to something a lot more structurally wrong with this. This is the story of a former soldier who gets dragged back into his old ways in order to save a family member from sex traffickers. We sure this wasn’t originally meant to be a Liam Neeson film? That combined with the finale, which takes the trap-building from First Blood and turns it into an R-rated Goonies sequel (complete with being set in an elaborate system of underground caves, the existence of which is scarcely justified), gives this an uncomfortable feeling that we’ve gone from leading the pack to following the leader. A leader that stopped marching years ago but these dudes hadn’t noticed.

Said uncomfortable feeling could also be a by-product of how graphic the violence is here, which eventually reaches a point where it’s so gory that it mimics an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, but that isn’t much of an issue here. Rambo ’08 was far worse than this in terms of blood and guts, and with the authoritarian regime doing most of the bloodletting, it made sense to be that confronting. Here? Not only is it gratuitous seemingly for its own sake, it’s also lit, shot and edited so wonkily that it can be difficult to even make out what’s going on

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But even with all that said, I do have to give this film a major point in its favour: John Rambo’s character is intact. Stallone’s performance and co-writing here holds onto his place as a former soldier for whom the war keeps replaying in his head, giving the character a sense of weight and emotional heft that anchors a lot of the film’s weirder moments, like when they rehash the ‘we should kill this guy, but let’s keep him alive because the plot needs us to’ cliché.

It also helps that the depiction of PTSD, along with a later showing of grief, end up melding together to highlight the notion of certain events that are so horrific to witness that, even long after the moment has passed, they continue to be witnessed and agonised over. It’s one of the better examples of trauma in a mainstream film that I’ve seen in a very long time.

What results from all of this is a film where I genuinely hope it really is the end of this franchise. As much as Stallone is still able to deliver as a lead actor, he still feels like he’s in a film that got hastily rewritten to be a Rambo movie, given how much of it reeks of borrowed material. This series has devolved from one of the most influential of all time to blindly chasing trends years after they were declared unnecessary and that, more than anything to do with racism or excessive violence, is what annoys me about this thing.