Review: Rambo: Last Blood

Image courtesy of Lionsgate.

Once upon a time, John Rambo was a sympathetic, anti-establishment figure - a long-haired Vietnam vet who returned home only to be terrorized by a corrupt sheriff and his minions in small town America. While Sylvester Stallone continues to get some mileage out of his other iconic character, Rocky Balboa, it's unclear why the actor wanted to yet again revisit Rambo and, in the process, make his finale so unpleasant.

It's true that Rambo has long been considered a right wing action hero after Ronald Reagan suggested that the character's style of negotiating with bad guys abroad was one he believed the United States should emulate. This was, of course, after that president's viewing of "Rambo: First Blood Part II," a highly stylized action movie that favored nonstop action scenes over the subtleties of the original picture.

With "Rambo: Last Blood," the character has become a full-blown MAGA fantasy. The film is casually racist and not-so-casually despicable. And its depiction of Mexico as a hellhole full of bad hombres, all of whom are lusting for violence and ready at the drop of a hat to sell Americans into sex slavery, should guarantee that the picture is Donald Trump's new favorite movie.

In the picture, Rambo is living quietly on a horse farm in Arizona, where he resides with his adopted family (Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter, Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). Rambo particularly likes the young girl, whom he takes horseback riding. But Gabrielle is determined to go to Mexico - "why would you want to do that?" Rambo asks her - to find her deadbeat dad who split on her and her mother years ago.

After Gabrielle's father turns out to be the creep that Rambo warned he is, Gabrielle gets nabbed by a sex trafficking ring led by the Martinez brothers (played by Oscar Jaenada and Sergio Peres-Mencheta). Rambo takes a trip to Mexico to confront the brothers, which leaves him with a scar on his face and results in severe punishment for Gabrielle, who is drugged and slashed across the face.

The film's two largest set pieces - which involve Rambo going apeshit on large numbers of Mexicans - appear to have been inspired by "Taxi Driver," "You Were Never Really Here" and, of all things, "Home Alone." The first involves Rambo whacking a bunch of guys with a steel claw hammer, while the latter is a battle at his home, which he has booby-trapped to the hilt.

"Last Blood" has more gore than a slasher film on the extreme end of the scale. Faces are dented in, bodies are blown to bits, a man has a bone yanked out of his chest and then snapped, arrows fly through heads and a guy is decapitated, only to later have his head thrown gleefully out of a moving vehicle's window. At one point, Rambo tells a guy he's going to rip his heart out of his chest, and you know that he'll deliver on that promise later in the movie.

Yes, of course, sex trafficking is a scourge, and there's certainly no pity to be had for the Martinez crew. But "Last Blood" portrays nearly every Mexican onscreen - other than a journalist (Paz Vega) who helps Rambo track down Gabrielle and a doctor who assists him - as a violent thug, and every street populated by our neighbors to the south as a decrepit slum. Much like the previous Rambo movie, it seems to relish watching the lead character sadistically brutalize cartoonishly stereotyped non-white characters.

In "First Blood," Rambo was a guy for whom we could root, a man who served his country and was targeted by some crooked redneck cops for his appearance. Rather than remaining an anti-establishment figure, Rambo has now become the avenger for an establishment that pegs all Mexicans as "criminals, drug dealers and rapists," as you-know-who put it on the campaign trail. At this point, I'd sooner be compelled to see a sequel to "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" than another Rambo movie.