Director: Adrian Grunberg
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Adriana Barraza, Yvette Monreal
In 1982’s First Blood, the traumatised Vietnam vet ran afoul in the Pacific Northwest and proceeded to all but level that town in a quest to simply be left alone. In 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, he was extracted from prison and sent back to Vietnam on a hunt for American POW’s, slaughtering Soviet and Vietnamese communists. In 1988’s Rambo III he journeyed to Afghanistan to rescue his old mentor from Soviet captivity, and in the process helped the country’s mujahideen fighters make the place Russia’s Vietnam. And in 2008’s Rambo, he rained death upon a Burmese warlord in order to free missionaries who’d been tending to the needs of the country’s oppressed minority.
Now in his final attempt, ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ see’s John seek revenge on the Mexican cartel who trafficked and murdered his niece, the only person John is living for. Directed by Adrian Grünberg from a script he co-wrote with star Sylvester Stallone, Last Blood strips the Rambo franchise of any political idea, he’s not on a rescue mission, and he’s not fighting for his country. Instead he’s spilling blood because he wants to, because he needs to.
The film begins, with Rambo living a tranquil life on his ranch in Arizona, where he now spends his time training horses, with his adopted family, Maria (played by Adriana Barraza) and her college-age granddaughter Gabrielle (played by Yvette Monreal). Like any paranoid war hero in an action film suffering from PTSD, Rambo has an elaborate underground tunnel system that he has dug out beneath his house (the perfect location for the occasional Nam flashback). Having tracked down her long lost father in Mexico, Gabrielle wants to go down to see him and understand why he left years earlier. Rambo tries to warn her that it’s a bad idea, Gabrielle is to determined to make this happen and goes anyway. After crossing the border, she is kidnapped and drugged by sex-traffickers headed by the fearsome Martinez brothers, Victor (played by Oscar Jaenada) and Hugo (played by Sergio Peris-Mencheta). When Rambo gets the news that Gabrielle has gone off to Mexico, he goes off in pursuit, but his first encounter with the Martinez gang ends with him brutally beaten and left for dead in an alley. He’s then rescued by Carmen (played by Paz Vega), an “independent journalist” who is there to tend to his wounds and offer necessary insight. Once he’s healed, Rambo returns to the Martinez joint to rescue Gabrielle in a violent rampage.
This becomes the prelude to the films action packed climax, when the Mexican cartel turn up at Rambo’s ranch out for blood, but they soon discover those underground tunnels have now been transformed into a death trap of arrows, knives, sawed-off shotguns, spikes, and mines.
By comparison to the previous instalments, the plot of Last Blood is very simplistic. The calling card of the Rambo myth is still present though, that John Rambo is a killer with a motive driven by a vendetta and vengeance. I have reason to believe that this film was bagged by critics because there was no political story, but the premise of what you want from a 90’s Rambo action film was still embodied in this story; that Rambo always favoured brute force over the more reasonable “hearts and minds” approach to modern warfare.
Rambo : Last Blood is out now.
“When you’re pushed,” John Rambo once said, “killing’s as easy as breathing.” In his decades-long career as an action-movie icon, Rambo has been pushed plenty.