Film Review: Rambo: Last Blood

0

Rambo: Last Blood (also known as Rambo V), is the fifth film in the Rambo franchise, and serves as the conclusion to John Rambo’s story of post-Vietnam War self-reflection and life as a renegade drifter in society.

Director: Adrian Grunberg  Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Adriana Barraza, Yvette Monreal, Genie Kim, Joaquín Cosío, Oscar Jaenada

There’s a scene toward the end of Rambo: First Blood – the first film in the Rambo Franchise released in 1982 – which features John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) and his former mentor and commanding officer, Colonel Trautman. It’s the penultimate scene of the film, and it shows Rambo experiencing a traumatic mental breakdown while telling a story to Trautman about a shoeshine box during his time in Vietnam.

It’s a fairly simple scene which displays Stallone’s early brilliance as an actor, and accurately reflects the kind of I-want-to-tear-my-skin-off distress I’ve heard in stories from real-life veterans. In a film that is largely propped up by early-’80s fight choreography and growling one-liners, it’s a moment of true, tragic horror; a beautiful young man forever made hollow by the callous and pointless brutality of war.

Flash-forward 37 years, and Old Man Rambo is now in his 70s, a grumbling recluse living beneath an old friend’s farm in Arizona, his life confined to the type of underground tunnel system any horror-film serial killer could only dream of calling home. He forges knives in a large, open metalwork furnace, talks with the clarity of a man chewing a mouthful of glue, and seems to only exist because death is too terrified to take him.

Rambo: Last Blood has a wafer-thin premise that sets up the Rambo-ness you’d expect from the film: Rambo’s “niece”, Gabriella (Yvette Montreal) is kidnapped by the Mexican Cartel after she crosses the border to reconnect with her father, a man who cruelly abandoned their family many years before, and Rambo embarks on a revenge-rescue mission.

Anyone hoping for more depth than a puddle will be disappointed; Cartel members give transparently misogynistic speeches about human-trafficking, Gabriella streams cinematically gorgeous tears from her giant, anime-character eyes, and there’s a tacked-on subplot about independent journalist, Carmen Delgado (Paz Vega), that serves only to put Rambo where he needs to be.

At just 89 minutes long, the film doesn’t drag these surrounding story elements out any longer than necessary; there’s enough supporting-character motivation to justify Rambo’s mission of vengeance, but not so much that you begin to question the importance of any of them.

Where Rambo: Last Blood shines is in its graphic brutality. Taking cues from 2017’s Logan, this newest installment doesn’t pretend Rambo is a glossy 30-something superhero, and instead paints him as an exhausted, tired sack of skin fuelled only by brute force and seething rage. This is illustrated in a scene mid-way through the film where Rambo sneaks into a Cartel brothel and uses a hammer to paint the walls with bad-guy blood like a kind of Frankenstein Jackson Pollock. It’s the first real instance of action we see in the film, and it works wonderfully by not cutting away or shadowing the raw violence within it.

This approach continues for the rest of the film’s action, which features bodies exploding, close-range headshots with a sawn-off shotgun, and a particularly delightful final scene showing Rambo’s skill with a compound bow and his signature knife. It’s a film that teeters on the edge of believability but doesn’t take itself too seriously, saving itself from eye-rolling reactions by offering the kind of joyful action nostalgia that you can’t help but simultaneously grimace and laugh at.

Unfortunately – even in the horrific, sex-trafficking world of the Cartel – we never get close to the depths of human suffering shown in that simple, conversational scene back in 1982, and that’s the only missed opportunity in this latest – and possibly final – Rambo film. Perhaps it’s because Rambo is now so confused and alienated from the modern world that nothing makes sense, only violence, vengeance, and ‘the mission’.

To track the character back to his first film paints an image of a broken soul, unable to escape his past and, as a result, forced to perpetually relive the horrors of war in the context of an outwardly peaceful world. As Rambo himself said nearly 40 years ago, “For me civilian life is nothing! In the field we had a code of honor, you watch my back, I watch yours. Back here there’s nothing!”

How tragic it is to know after all those years, all those wars, and all that bloodshed, he was right.

Oxford Lamoureaux

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oxford Lamoureaux
Latest posts by Oxford Lamoureaux (see all)