I may have mentioned before that Sylvester Stallone is cinema royalty. He has maintained an incredibly successful career for well over forty years and remains active in the Hollywood scene. One of his earlier significant successes was First Blood, the very first Rambo movie. Released in 1982 and based on the book by David Morell, it was the story of a wandering Vietnam vet named Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) who stops in a small town looking for a place to eat. Except the local Sherrif takes issue with him and tries to arrest him for vagrancy, which triggers a few war flashbacks in Rambo, causing him to go on a rampage. It is still a great film and one I appreciate a great deal. It would go on to spawn a few sequels of varying degrees of quality, but what made them all worthwhile was how Stallone would use the prestige of the Rambo character to raise awareness of important issues. Example: the main reason he did the fourth movie was to raise awareness of the conflict in Burma. His latest outing, Rambo: Last Blood, does not seem to have any kind of real issue it wants to raise awareness of, other than the fact that this movie is utterly atrocious.
I cannot remember the last time I have felt so disappointed, frustrated, and insulted by a movie this year. After sitting through this garbage, I went straight home and rewatched the first movie again so that I could renew my faith in the original story and Stallone's capability as an artist. Rambo: Last Blood has got to be the laziest, dumbest, most aggravating piece of vile crap I have ever had the disadvantage to sit through, and I rue the day I ever come across another film even worse.
The whole film can best be summarized as Taken meets Home Alone but with Rambo and a hard "R" rating, and not as impressive as that may sound. The story follows John Rambo now living a peaceful life on his old family ranch in Arizona raising and training Horses. His niece Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), to whom Rambo has been a surrogate father, is heading off to college, but not before she confronts her estranged father in Mexico to seek some sense of closure as to why he left her and her mother. Rambo, already aware of the vicious and terrible person her father was, discourages Gabrielle from going. Despite Rambo's warnings, Gabrielle goes straight to Mexico and, I kid you not, immediately gets kidnapped by Mexican gangsters and put into sexual slavery, where she is regularly drugged and given to random men. They even cut a mark on her face to label her as their property. Rambo makes his way to Mexico and rescues Gabrielle who sadly dies after crossing the border. Rambo, in a fit of rage, sends a message to the gangsters and their leaders demanding his revenge, but not before Rambo sets up his ranch, and his massive maze of tunnels he built, with death traps and ready weapons for a bloody and painful showdown. Which is the best and only good part of the whole film, but I'll get to that later.
Let's get the most significant issue out of the way. This films depiction of Mexico and Mexican people is insulting. I grant you that Mexico as a place may not be the best, especially in particular areas, but it's not like an all-evil encompassing wasteland as the movie would have you believe. Every single Mexican person (minus one or two) is either an evil gangster or the victim/endangered servent of gangsters. The only Mexican characters who are not bad guys don't have any real presence or purpose in the story other than to guide Rambo to the next plot point. In terms of horrendously bad misrepresentation of an entire people, it is officially worse than the treatment of Mexicans in the movie Peppermint from last year, and that movie had a whole drug smuggling business operating out of a Penyata factory.
Setting aside the unnecessary demonization of an entire culture, the movie suffers from a severe lack of texture. None of the characters are given any real development, it has nothing to say about the pressing issues it's playing with, and it is in such a hurry to get to the big bloody finale that the whole film feels like it's playing in fast forward. Scenes end abruptly, the dialogue has no meat to it, and any possibility the film had of being genuinely engaging is thrown away and forgotten by the next scene. This movie feels like huge chunks of it were cut away at the last minute for the sake of putting together something extreme and intense in theaters for the tail end of Summer. It's like the producers watched the original cut all the way through and said: "Okay, take out as much as you can so it's still technically feature-length, and there's little going on before the big bloody finale." I would say that the inmates are running the Asylum, but I'm not sure they wouldn't do a better job.
What ticked me off the most was the fact that they fridged Gabrielle for no good reason. For those of you who don't know what I mean, "fridged" is a term coined by comic book readers used to describe an unnecessary death of a female character which only serves the purpose of giving the male lead a cause for which to be heroic. I would prefer not to describe the exact origins of the term here but, I can assure you, it is not at all pleasant. Aside from it being disgusting, my main issue with this trope is that it's lazy. It instantly provides a reason for revenge which is the worst thing to desire in a narrative and indeed in real life. It deprives the story and the audience of more texture and development of the characters as well as a more satisfying motivation for the hero to take action. I have utterly despised this trope and its lazy repetitiveness ever since I encountered it in The Bourne Supremacy. The moment it happened in that movie (which was within the first thirty minutes), I instantly lost any and all interest, because it signaled to me that the storytellers didn't care, and that is probably the most insulting thing any storyteller can do to an audience.
The film was directed by Adrian Grunberg, who is really a second unit director, mainly focusing on action scenes. Sadly, Rambo: Last Blood has proven that hs is not ready for an actual narrative, and maybe never will be. The guy clearly has little to no experience working with actual scripts and actors. The only things he's directed before this movie was Get The Gringo starring Mel Gibson from 2012 and an episode of the TV series Here On Earth. Otherwise, his time is spent piecing together action sequences and any other second unit stuff that may be required of him. I am not saying that second unit people cannot transition to higher positions, but directing a movie requires talent in more than one area. If Adrian Grunberg has any actual ability as a full-time director, I have yet to see it.
Now, I will admit that despite how awful this film is, I found its climactic battle scene between Rambo and all the evil gangsters to be primitively satisfying. Mainly because I am of the firm opinion that any and all sex traffickers deserve to be mistreated in the most inhumane fashion possible with extreme prejudice. No exceptions and no mercy! So watching the entire gang of less-than-human peddlers of female slavery getting utterly destroyed in the worst possible way by Rambo was...almost cathartic. I am not ashamed to admit. If this were how all sex traffickers were punished, I would not mind it. This is literally the only positive thing I have to say about Rambo: Last Blood.
This movie is inexcusable, and Sylvester Stallone should have known better. There is no justifiable reason for this movie to be the way it is. The only reason I can think of for the existence of this film is that Sylvester Stallone needed something to pay his taxes with, and a quick cash grab with his Rambo franchise was the easiest thing to do. This movie is a travesty, a mockery, and possibly the ugliest stain on cinema to date. All I have left to say is this: Sylvester Stallone, we deserve an apology from you.
Is this movie worth seeing?
No.
Is it worth seeing in Theaters?
No.
Why?
It is total, absolute, and utter garbage. A disgrace to the world of cinema and a sign of the imminent implosion of Hollywood. Stay as far away from this film as you possibly can.
Ladies & gentlemen, I am TheNorm, thank you all for reading.
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