Sometimes, just a name can bring people into a theater. It doesn’t matter if the film follows a formula we’ve seen so many times. If the guy has the star power, people will come. Sylvester Stallone is one of those actors. We’ve seen him play the bad-ass time and time again throughout his career, whether it’s been in The Expendables, or of course the Rambo franchise. Stallone has made a name for himself being one of America’s action heroes in cinema.
This time around, the latest in the actor’s action films is Rambo: Last Blood, and it’s EVERYTHING you would expect. It’s not that action flicks aren’t a fun time, and Last Blood manages to take the mind off of things for a while, but when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. That same sentiment remains for this movie.
This time the film attempts to take the route of a slow burn, which might not have helped its cause. John Rambo is retired, and lives on a farm, taking care of a friend, and her grandchild, Gabriella. When Gabriella disobeys John’s orders and drives down to Mexico to confront her estranged father, she ends up trapped in a deadly sex-trafficking ring. When Rambo catches wind of this, he heads down to Mexico, in an attempt to save the girl.
It’s not as if I was expecting Last Blood to re-invent the wheel. I knew what I was getting the second I walked into that theater. It’s a Rambo movie. But many things hold this film back. One of those things is overall acting. Everything in Last Blood feels phoned in. Its dialogue at times is plain cheesy, and that first act is among the worst in any Rambo film. I can’t help but think, that if Stallone hadn’t been the star for this, and the title wasn’t Rambo, that this would be a video-on-demand movie. It’s also frightening just how similar Last Blood‘s plot is to Rambo: First Blood Part II. Replace prison with retirement, and set the film in Mexico instead of Vietnam. Rambo’s motives are the same in both. The girl dies, and he avenges.
Even with how dull it is at times, the barely saving grace is, of course, the climax of the film. The bloody retribution that we’ve come to expect in every Rambo flick is genuinely why we buy the ticket. And it would be unfair to leave out that Rambo: Last Blood does not disappoint in that department. There was plenty of blood and gore to go around in the last twenty minutes of the movie, but not much beyond that. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen this movie before.
