An end credits montage of old Rambo movies at the end of Rambo: Last Blood is a sad reminder of how far Sylvester Stallone’s secondary franchise (after Rocky) has devolved. Ever since Ted Kotcheff’s gritty and gripping First Blood, the Vietnam vet has taken an inexorable slide to the cartoon-y and the irrelevant. The latest, and seemingly the last, is now on a par with his Escape Plan franchise, a sad end for one of cinema’s most engaging anti-heroes.
The film gets off to a sluggish start with Rambo in a rocking chair, living out his retirement on an Arizona farm in scenes striving hard to reach the soulful qualities of Logan — we see him (impressively) riding horses, popping pills and making a letter opener for his niece Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal) before she goes off to college. Yet even this scene-setting stuff feels like join-the-dots: Gabrielle throws a party that is only designed to let us know that Rambo has built survivalist tunnels like he did in his old ’Nam days that will certainly come into play in the last reel.
The plot kicks in when Gabrielle travels to Mexico to make contact with her absent father and ends up being inducted as a sex slave by a drug cartel run by brothers Victor (Óscar Jaenada) and Hugo (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), surely a joke for the Les Misérables crowd. Of course, Rambo comes looking for Gabrielle, turning detective by intimidating minions for info, then going full Travis Bickle by taking a hammer to the denizens of a brothel.
By this stage, Rambo: Last Blood is riddled with narrative flab, risible speechifying, wild plot conveniences (Paz Vega plays a journalist whose One Job is to keep Rambo on the right track with the investigation), routine action filmmaking (everything is hammered home by Brian Tyler’s wall-to-wall score) and a caricatured, xenophobic attitude to Mexicans (it feels like a film designed for the Trump heartland). There’s throwback fun to be had as Rambo lures the goons back to his booby-trapped farmhouse coming on like an 18-certificate Home Alone, but by this time you barely care.
Perhaps the saddest thing is Stallone himself, so charming in Ryan Coogler’s Creed, but unable to imbue Rambo with anything approaching humanity — the character often talks about "trying to keep a lid" on his dark side yet there’s no sense of a man actually wrestling with his demons. With a film entitled Last Blood, you hope — for Stallone’s, the audience’s and cinema’s sake — it delivers on the promise
