Not to give away any massive spoilers (as if you WEREN’T expecting just a tad bit of carnage in this film), but after mowing down a throng of dastardly thugs in ‘Rambo: Last Blood’, our 73-year old hero limps to his porch and collapses in a rocking chair.
Yup, a rocking chair. So, like…..is this supposed to be a comedy???
No. But the idea of Sly Stallone resurrecting his most hyper-violent character IS a little amusing, given both the actor’s age AND what this franchise has become. And really, the downward slope started back in 1985 with the first sequel. What was once a SLIGHTLY believable yarn about a soldier returning home from Vietnam only to find an alarmingly unwelcome reception in 1982’s ‘First Blood’ quickly evolved into a cartoonish saga about a shirtless, bandana-wearing killing machine, slaughtering any foreign baddie that does the U.S.A. harm.
‘Last Blood’, the fifth edition of the series, finds John Rambo in his twilight years on the farm. Sure, it’s a farm equipped with a sea of underground tunnels and more artillery than most small nations….but this Rambo, after all. When his surrogate daughter (Yvette Monreal) unwisely goes looking across the border in Mexico for her biological father – who is one bad hombre, by the way -she predictably finds herself in peril. Then……well, c’mon. You know what happens. Again, it’s Rambo.
A friend who saw the film around the same time I did remarked that Stallone’s luring of the thugs to his home turf where he dispatches of them in the most grisly of ways was reminiscent of a gory version of ‘Home Alone’ – and really, that’s bang on. Old school action fans might enjoy seeing one of the most iconic butt kickers of all time giving it one last go, setting up gruesome traps to serve blood-spattering justice. But gosh, it’s SO over the top, even by ‘Rambo’ standards. By the time Stallone cuts the heart out of a primary antagonist and shows it to him, I’m done. And so is any kind of guilty pleasure appeal the idea of a sequel ever carried.
