Rambo: Last Blood

Rambo: Last Blood is an action movie that wallows in misery and human suffering.  When you consider what a great action movie can do, it seems all the more cheap.  This is a genre that can provide more than great thrills and stunt work.  Films like these can be fun, cathartic, and offer escapism.  You get the sense that all director Adrian Grunberg and Sylvester Stallone (who co-wrote the script) want to do is inflect pain upon the audience. 

If anything, the movie proves that a mainstream film pushed out by a major studio can never receive an NC-17 rating for violent content.  If this were a small, independent production, it would be viewed as controversial for its almost non-stop depiction of misery and graphic violence.  But, because Hollywood money is behind it, it got an R with no problem.  At my screening, there was a father sitting in the row behind me with his two young sons, who looked no older than eight.  I wasn't about to ask what he was thinking taking them to a movie like this.  That is his decision.  I did, however, want to ask the boys what they thought of some of the imagery.  I did hear the dad proclaim "Jesus Christ..." out loud to himself during a scene where John Rambo drops some men on a pit of spikes, and then riddles their skewered bodies with bullets.  His accompanying children were silent throughout the movie.

So, it's been 11 years since the last time Stallone took up the role of Rambo.  Since then, he has bought a farmhouse where he lives quietly with an adopted Mexican family, Maria (Adriana Barraza) and her beautiful daughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), who is about to head off for college soon.  Rambo spends a quiet life tending to the horses, which are interrupted only by the occasional 'Nam flashback.  He's also dug a series of intricate tunnels underneath the house, where he spends his time popping pills to keep his PTSD in check.  The plot kicks off when Gabrielle has a friend help her track down her deadbeat dad who left her years ago.  She wants to go to Mexico to find him, and know why he left.  Rambo advises against this, but that young innocent girl with the bright future ahead of her just won't listen, gosh darn it.

She heads to Mexico, and not ten minutes later, she's been kidnapped and entered into a sex-trafficking ring where she is constantly abused and doped up by our villains, Victor (Oscar Jaenada) and Hugo (Sergio Peris-Mencheta).  Their names may be a reference to the famed 19th Century French author, Victor Hugo, but I can't say for sure.  When Rambo finds out, he drives off to find the men responsible and bring Gabrielle home.  His first attempt to confront the gang ends with him being beaten badly.  After he is healed up by a kindly stranger who also has a beef with the criminal gang, he goes after them again.  All of this leads up to an extended climax where John Rambo rigs up his farm home with a series of Home Alone-style booby traps, only grizzlier and deadlier.  This is kind of what that holiday film would have been like if Macaulay Culkin's character from The Good Son had been in charge of defending the house from the Wet Bandits.

Rambo: Last Blood devotes the first hour or so to the suffering and violence being inflected upon Rambo and his adopted family.  It then spends its last half hour in a non-stop orgy of over the top blood and gore as the hero takes revenge. ("I want them to know that death is coming", Rambo says as he prepares to set up the traps.) Either way, it's not much fun.  I guess we're supposed to cheer as we watch these men who raped and drugged poor Gabrielle get slaughtered like cattle, decapitated, skewered, blown to bits, tortured, and dropped into pits lined with spikes.  Frankly, I found the entire movie heavy-handed, poorly made, and kind of repulsive.  Its sole purpose is to ram the point home that there is only pain and suffering in the world, and that you can never truly be happy.

As if to ram the point home that nobody cared, the movie is badly staged, and edited in such a way that we can sometimes barely see what is happening during a lot of the action.  Perhaps this was the only way the filmmakers could avoid an NC-17 rating.  They had to show just enough, but make the camera move and shake so much that we can barely focus on what is happening sometimes.  Whatever the reason, the direction by Grunberg is uninspired, and the script by Stallone and Matthew Cirulnick is simplistic to the point that the audience is given nothing to think about.  Everyone is either tortured and miserable, or broad and horrible.  The sole exception is the lovely Gabrielle, who is so sunny, sweet and innocent that you can almost smell the scent of freshly cleaned bed sheets permeating from her character.  Naturally, this means that the only things waiting for her are torture and horror.  That'll teach her for having a positive outlook on life in this movie!

The studio wants us to believe that this is the last time we'll see Rambo up on the screen.  Naturally, the movie ends on a note where there can still be another movie, should this rake in enough cash.  Given that it probably didn't have a big budget to start with, that's almost a guarantee.  As long as there is pain and misery in the world, Rambo will be there to splash it up on the big screen to remind us.  Isn't that lovely?

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