Rambo: Last Blood (2019)
Directed by Adrian Grünberg
After fighting his demons for decades, John Rambo now lives in peace on his family ranch in Arizona, but his rest is interrupted when Gabriela, the granddaughter of his housekeeper María, disappears after crossing the border into Mexico to meet her biological father. Rambo, who has become a true father figure for Gabriela over the years, undertakes a desperate and dangerous journey to find her.
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35 films that influenced Rambo: Last Blood
What critics say influenced Rambo: Last Blood
It’s as if Stallone is playing, I don’t know, Ron Glambo, an escapee from a Taken and Logan rip-off.
At least the movie has Stallone’s seething, angry face, as every sweaty closeup says more than the bland “Taken” rip-off that forms the movie’s plot.
The movie is basically a more downbeat version of Taken in which Rambo tears across the border from Texas to save his surrogate daughter, Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), from the murderous, drug-pushing sex-slavers who’ve kidnapped her and pumped her veins full of dope.
That way you can skip the part of the movie where Stallone retcons himself into a Taken rip-off, unable to save a young woman’s virtue but still ready and willing to slaughter a bus load of guys with brown skin.
The film acts as if it is the second coming of Taken on steroids.
The premise is meant to capture the excitement of Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire” (2004) or Liam Neeson in “Taken” (2008), mining thrills from a scorned macho man seeking revenge against the evil doers who have endangered his loved ones.
That’s not to say it can’t work; Clint Eastwood directed himself to Oscar glory as an aging gunslinger trying to escape his violent past in “Unforgiven” (1992), from which “Rambo: Last Blood” borrows a lot of graveside imagery.
Far from the moody, Unforgiven-lite meditation on violence and revenge it could have been, the fifth Rambo too often smacks of a generic studio thriller with a familiar franchise label slapped on it.
When the film’s teaser trailer released, many compared it to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) and James Mangold’s Logan (2017).
But it was relatively easy to be tantalised by the idea behind Rambo: Last Blood, which Stallone likened to the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men pre-release.
Many scripts were written including one compared to the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men (2007).
Rambo starts the movie fantasizing about life where he’s like Ed Tom Bell, the weary lawman at the end of his line in No Country for Old Men ; in the end he finds regressive self-actualization as something akin to Anton Chigurh, an unbridled spirit of violence from the same story.
Determined to have his revenge, Rambo dives into its complex preparations with an almost demented thoroughness, coming up with endless awful ways for the bad guys to die, mixing in everything from a reference to Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood” to a truly grisly Grand Guignol horror conclusion.
The director, Mel Gibson crony Adrian Grunberg, stages the action with reasonable efficiency, although the gore and dismemberment quotient goes way over the top to the point of camp; one heavy gets the Toshiro Mifune treatment from the end of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood .
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I was genuinely not expecting the level that this film went to, especially in the final act which can only be described as “ Home Alone on steroids”.
An unnecessary “final” sequel that finds the now-73-year-old Green Beret fighting south-of-the-border invaders in Home Alone -style fashion (no, seriously), it’s a film that feels like the dying gasp of a series that refuses to go gently into that good night—especially since it can tailor its xenophobic bloodbath for our current Trumpian era.
But for the most part, the film relies on quick shots of Rambo stabbing or shooting people, or quick edits of a Home Alone-style trap working long enough for him to double-tap headless bodies.
Rambo: Last Blood is basically Taken meets Home Alone , only racist.
When the baddies arrive, a sequence begins that’s straight out of “Home Alone,” if in that heartwarming Christmas classic, Kevin McCallister had brutally murdered more than 20 people.
Last Blood certainly delivers in that regard especially when you get to see all the “Home Alone” traps that were advertised in the trailer.
The explosive finale is booby traps galore, but unlike the family friendly pratfalls of “Home Alone” (1990) or “Swiss Family Robinson” (1960), this one is the gory culmination of an overly graphic film.
This was presumably a chance to have a thematic reckoning with the iconic character, the way that John Wayne had the good instincts to do with his final film, The Shootist .
The script from Stallone and Matthew Cirulnick (Paid in Full) could easily substitute the increasingly vexed protagonist from the Taken films or tired old fart Paul Kersey from the Death Wish saga into the same scenario.
Rambo: Last Blood is an abomination in the way all the Charles Bronson Death Wish sequels were terrible.
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Rather than a truly introspective look at a child searching for a parent like “Central Station” (1998) or “The Kid with a Bike” (2011), Gabriela’s journey is an excuse to get her kidnapped so that Rambo can race across the border.
¿Quién no recuerda títulos como Desaparecido en combate (Joseph Zito, 1984), Commando (Mark L. Lester, 1985) o Cobra, el brazo fuerte de la ley (George Pan Cosmatos, 1986)?