RAMBO: LAST BLOOD (2019) ****

There are few things more American than seeing Rambo in the theater with your dad.  I’ve seen every one of Rambo’s adventures since Part 2 in the theater with my old man, and each installment has strengthened the bond between father and son over the years.  When I heard Sylvester Stallone was coming out with his latest (I hesitate to say “last” because something tells me he’s still got another one of these things up his sleeve) installment, I figured, why mess with tradition?  So, I called up my dad, and despite our conflicting schedules, we made a point to see it together on opening night.  Boy, am I glad I did!  Stallone didn’t disappoint either of us.  

Right off the bat, we know this isn’t quite the same Rambo we’ve seen before.  For one, he’s got SHORT HAIR!  I honestly didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about this.  From the very beginning, Rambo always had long hair.  I mean the long hair is important to the character because…how else are you supposed to tell him apart from Rocky, for God’s sake!  Seeing him with short hair… took some getting used to?  Eventually, I got on board with it, mostly because I was too preoccupied counting up the dead bodies.  

It was interesting to see how else Rambo had changed over the years.  For starters, we’ve never seen him in “the world” before.  In the first film, he was drifting from town to town still with his Army jacket on his back.  Now he’s rocking a new cowboy look straight out of a Marlboro Man ad!  Some might cry foul on this, but come on, who knows?  Maybe John J. loved to wear cowboy boots and lasso mustangs when he wasn’t off fighting for Uncle Sam.  Maybe all this time when he was in the jungles wearing his red headbands and jade necklaces, he was actually yearning for a ten-gallon hat.  Who am I to say?  

When we first met Rambo, he hadn’t yet set down roots after the war.  He hadn’t even begun to find his place in a country that ostracized him for merely being a veteran.  Now, after all these years, and various pitstops to Vietnam, Tibet, Afghanistan, and Burma, Rambo has finally returned home to America and found structure, family, and peace.

Well… maybe not peace.  You see, even though he’s got a big farmhouse, lots of land, and plenty of room to break in horses, he opts to live in a vast underground tunnel system he’s carved out for himself in and around the property.  I’ll get more into this aspect later, because it’s a crucial element to the film that I think a lot of my fellow critics have slept on.

Anyway, the plot is simple.  The teenaged Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal) is Rambo’s family friend.  He dotes on her like he would his own daughter.  When she learns her biological father is alive and living in Mexico, she takes an ill-advised trip south of the border to meet him.  There, she gets kidnapped by sex traffickers, and it’s up to Rambo, John J. to save her.

Melding elements of Death Wish, Punisher:  War Zone, You Were Never Really Here, and Taken into the typical Rambo DNA was a… ahem… sly choice.  The last one was such a perfect send-off for the character that it made me kinda hope Stallone was going to let the series end there.  Sly proved me wrong as this is a great addition to the franchise.  It may not be up to the upper echelon of Rambo, First Blood, and First Blood Part 2, but it’s a mean, nasty, bleak, and brutal action movie.  That is to say, I fucking loved it. 

What’s remarkable is that Sly found some nuance and poignancy to go along with the gratuitous bloodshed.  As I stated before, we see Rambo working on a horse farm. but he doesn’t live in the house.  Instead. he lives in an elaborate underground tunnel system of his own design.  This is just so fucking perfect that I got a lump in my throat the moment I saw him living down there.  Many have missed the symbolism of this, so please allow me to elaborate why this little touch is so heartbreaking.

Okay, remember the long scene in First Blood when Rambo eludes the police and goes into hiding in the underground mine?  This sequence takes up a lot of screen time, but it is crucial to the formation of the character as we would later know him.  While looking for his way out, he goes on a hero’s quest, entering one side as a frightened fugitive and emerging from the other as a killing machine. 

Rambo’s homemade tunnels are symbolic of his past deeds.  He’s been in similar terrain and came out the other side a killing machine.  The tunnels symbolize the bridge between two worlds:  The man he once was and the killing machine he is prone to become.  As Rambo himself says, “You can’t change.  All you can do is put a lid on it.”   Staying isolated in those tunnels is his way of putting a lid on his tendencies.  Once Gabrielle is kidnapped, his world is torn apart and that lid comes off.  Big time.

There are gonna be spoilers here, and I apologize, but I’m only doing so to drive the whole tunnel metaphor home.  In the end, Rambo lures the bad guys onto his home turf, and into the tunnels, which he has fitted with various homemade booby traps, effectively turning most of the men into the consistency of peanut butter soup along the way.  Finally, he expels the ringleader of the abuse (whom he appropriately saves for last) by setting off a series of explosions that flush him out of the tunnels and above ground.  In doing so, Rambo causes the entire mineshaft system to collapse upon itself.  Not only has he blown up the tunnels and his home, he’s also severed the sole lifeline tethering him from out and out savagery.  It’s a powerful moment, stating that there’s no going back.  There’s no more John the cowboy.  There’s only Rambo, the killing machine.

Or maybe I’m just reading WWWAAAAAAYYYYY too much into things.  Look, it’s been eleven years since we saw Rambo, John J. turn the bad guys into little bitty pieces.  So, maybe I’m just overcompensating a little due to the long wait.  

I honestly can’t tell you how good it was to see Rambo draw a bow again.  Action fans will be eating up the finale (which features one of the best needle-drops of a classic rock song you’ll hear this year), in which Rambo shows no mercy as he stabs, chops, slices, eviscerates, guns down, blows up and generally makes pasta salad out of the bad guys.  There’s even a moment where he goes full-on Sub-Zero on a villain that will have you cheering.  Imagine a straight-faced Machete movie and that might give you an idea of what to expect.

If Rambo:  Last Blood is in fact, the last Blood, it’ll be a nice conclusion.  The title may sound like a joke from an episode of The Simpsons or something, but it’s fitting.  It perfectly sums up Stallone’s willingness to entertain as he’s practically given us his very last drop of blood to keep the fans happy.  

In the words of Rambo, John J.:  “Mission accomplished!”