Rambo: Last Blood (Dir Adrian Grunberg, 1h 29m)

How does one talk about bad films? Rambo: Last Blood, with its brutish, misanthropic, xenophobic, positively Trumpian rhetoric of grizzled Sly Stallone going out on one last adventure to gain revenge on cartoonishly stereotypical Mexican villains is, certainly, a bad movie, there's no denying that, but it is not bad in the way that the "enjoyably bad" of films like Tommy Wiseau's The Room or Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space are. Both of these, after all, for all their corniness and flouting of the laws of comprehensible cinematic language, have brought joy to countless audiences, even if unintentionally.

 Last Blood brings joy to nobody but its core demographic of bloodthirsty misanthropic xenophobes, in what is an abyssal, sickening low to the already tumultuous career of Sylvester Stallone, in what may be the worst film of his entire career (somehow worse than Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!) and nothing short of a savage, yet stereotypically lazy, punch down against an entire nation, from an actor who has practically made a career out of personifying the average joe and the little guy.

The problems begin and end with the very concept of Last Blood, Sly rolling back into the saddle to sign off on a character he already felt he gave a fitting end in Rambo (2008). It is a crass and pointless cash in, no doubt fuelled by the fact that Stallone has now resurrected his other great role, Rocky Balboa, as a mentor in the well-received Creed films. With only an hour and a half to play with, the film is practically skeletal, and even more so after 11th-hour recuts, and the plot is as bare as they come. Following her kidnap by a Mexican cartel, Rambo is forced to go in search of, and exact vengeance for Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal, doing her best with what scraps of character she actually has), the granddaughter of an old friend of Rambo, with this revenge eventually reaching Rambo's own farmstead.

In a smarter director's hands, and perhaps with a less deliberately political heft, Last Blood would not feel like the words of the neo-right, and Donald Trump's spurious claims of vast hordes of bogeymanish "coyotes and drug cartels in control south of the border". As it is, however, there is not a single positively written Mexican character in the entire film, making the film seem equal parts white-saviour narrative and positively racist quasi-propaganda, at its nadir. It's a film that feels like a unwelcome time capsule from the Reagan era, if not even earlier, a grindhouse picture with little care for more sensitive sensibilities; it's a tone-deaf choice that makes the film leave a bad taste in the mouth; even for a series that has never been overly culturally sensitive, Last Blood feels like it makes no effort in making any Mexican character anything other than a victim, or part of the cartels.

Its female characters are either sexual temptresses and utterly untrustworthy, as in the case of Jezel, whose entire appearance and role in the film is little more than a series of lazy stereotypes, to the unfortunate slaves of the cartel, who at best are passive victims and at worse are treated in voyeuristic fashion, to the passive older women, in the case of Rambo's long-time friend, Maria, and journalist Carmen (Paz Vega), who have no taste for revenge, even in the case of Carmen, who has lost her sister to the Cartel, who has to be eventually talked out of having "moved on", in one of the most tone-deaf sequences of the film.

This, however, is nothing compared to the men. Every single Mexican male character, from the Martinez brothers, both written as rapacious, violent, utterly amoral figures, to Gabrielle's feckless father, to the vast armies of the Martinez brothers, are stereotypically written, stereotypically acted villains that feel simply like the rhetoric of so many xenophobic Americans given flesh-Stallone alone is a good man against a sea of invaders-when the army finally descend upon the Rambo farm, it's under the wall, in black-tinted SUVs, feeling more like the vanguard of an invading army than a simple gang of criminals. These are faceless goons, led by a cardboard stereotype of a "final boss" for Rambo to defeat for his revenge.

The single saving grace of this film is how it shoots action, but even this feels hollow, a retread of the gritty gory violence of Logan, but launched against an entire national stereotype-at points it becomes almost bleakly comedic, particularly in the Home Alone-aping denouement, with Martinez's army of men whittled down by the armoury of traps, hidden weaponry and shockingly violent ends meted out by John Rambo, undermined by the palpable glee that this film has in showing each and every Saw-style offing. It's a trump-card that is made nigh useless by the film putting it in practically every hand it has to play when an action scene pops up, and by the time the film crunches to an end after only ninety minutes, it's ridden this one trick to death.

Moreover, it feels like a disservice to the character of Rambo himself-this is a man suffering from PTSD-something the film, like every other positive element about Rambo, seems to gloss over after one scene-rather than the reluctant hero of previous instalments, brought into conflict at the last resort, he now seems just another action hero sent out to mete justice upon a tidily generically evil force of identikit villains. Gone is the surprisingly emotive, honourable, tough John Rambo who allies with downtrodden locals to defeat those who subjugate them, and in his place is simply a generic, unthinking, unfeeling, and unlikable vigilante.

What one is left with is a film that is, frankly, even among the storied Rambo series, an unpleasantly misanthropic, positively racist-and certainly xenophobic-entry that feels like an entirely unnecessary addition to a series that had already ended, and a disservice to its protagonist and his journey over the last four decades. There are few films I wish I could un-watch, never having to count the minutes until it petered out into credits. This is one of them. It is irredeemably, unwatchably bad.


Rating: Avoid At All Costs