It's been however many years it needs to be for the story to work since John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) came home to the family farm. Now he spends his days training horses and looking on admiringly at his housekeeper's granddaughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal) like she was some kind of machete or other instrument of death. Because, just in case the maze of tunnels he's dug under the farm filled with guns didn't give it away, Rambo has Become War and all this family crap is barely keeping a lid on it.
Then Gabrielle announces she can't go to university until she goes to Mexico to try and find her father, which Rambo knows is a bad move from watching Sicario or any one of countless other films where Mexico is hell on earth. Long story short, she goes south of the border, discovers her real father is a dirtbag and gets grabbed by the Mexican Sex Cartel. Looks like Rambo has some work to do.
What separates this from every other Taken knock off of the last fifteen years is that Rambo, who is roughly a billion years old now and has nothing to lose, is totally, 100% willing to Go There. "There" being a place where every single act of violence - and there are oh so many acts of violence in this film - is treated like it belongs in a horror movie. It's basically Taken if the woman being kidnapped was related to Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th films, which sounds like a joke until you see Rambo reach into a guy's shoulder, grab his collarbone, tear his collarbone from his body and then snap it. And the movie still has an hour to go.
For a fair while now horror movies have been moving in on action movie's turf. Most home invasion films eventually reach a point where the good guys fight back; the most recent Halloween movie was basically Michael Myers vs Sarah Connor. Rambo: Last Blood is the other half of that trend, an action movie that turns into a horror film.
Sure, the bad guys here have done bad things and deserve to die. But they deserve to be gunned down in a generic gun battle or maybe - if they're particularly vile - they might require an up-close stabbing for audiences to feel like justice has been served. You know what they don't require? Falling into a pit, getting impaled on spikes, then having Rambo shoot them so their head explodes. Entire movies have built up to scenes of horror that here are just throw away moments (in one case involving a severed head, literally). War might be Hell, but Hell is going to have its work cut out for it to top the suffering these guys go through.
Stallone, who at this stage of his career is almost entirely charisma free but can still write a competent grindhouse script, does at least remember to give Rambo a scene where he gets his arse kicked so all this violence is slightly justified. It's almost possible if you squint to imagine that the idea here is that, now that Rambo is clearly too old to beat anyone in hand-to-hand combat, turning his farm into a Death Farm is his way to even the odds. But the level of violence is so excessive, so startlingly extreme, that none of that matters. Does anything matter?
This ends with a montage of highlights from Rambo's on-screen adventures, including a number of clips from the movie we just saw. It's like the film is desperately trying to reassure us that what we just saw really is part of the Rambo story, that the flag-waving Reagan-era commie-killing hero really does now live in a hole where he spends his days hacking off criminals' faces with a machete.
There's probably a statement in there somewhere about America.
- Anthony Morris
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