Rambo: Last Blood movie review — a Taken sequel with added dose of jaw-dropping stupidity

Here are a few things I learned from watching Rambo: Last Blood — Mexicans are bad hombres, they abandon their cancer ridden wives and infant daughters, they pretend to be friends but kidnap and rape young American women, and that only a white, broad chested savior who looks like Sylvester Stallone placed in water for a few hours would be able to rid the world of rape-y Mexicans.

To say that Rambo: Last Blood is tone deaf would be an understatement – this is a film that not only doesn’t respect the sensitivity of the worldwide progressive socio-cultural tilt, but is so short sighted, it seems like propaganda for the racists and bigots. Mind you, I am a major fan of the original First Blood, and have found some trashy entertainment value in the first two sequels, but Last Blood is the point where I felt like whipping out my bazooka from under the seat and firing all six missiles at the screen.

Last Blood, directed by Adrian Grunberg, introduces us to a now retired John Rambo who now lives at a ranch, rides horses like a cowboy and takes care of an immigrant family. For some reason he has also built a maze of tunnels but it’s not hard to guess how they would be used in the film. When the daughter of the family goes missing in Mexico, Rambo switches on his Liam Neeson mode and utilizes his set of skills to rescue the girl from the hands of oily goons.

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This is, very much a Taken sequel but with an added dose of jaw-dropping stupidity, utter and complete disregard for audience’s intelligence, less than zero effort to make a coherent action sequence, and also a series of unintentionally funny attempts to become a melancholic and poetic final goodbye to this 80’s pop culture icon.

Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: Last Blood. YouTube

It would have been easy to forgive the outright idiocy of the rest of the film, if at least the action were enjoyable. The aforementioned tunnels are used by Rambo as booby traps like in a Home Alone movie, but the whole ‘people falling into the traps’ shtick gets very old very fast.

At least the previous Rambo movie had a moment where a guy gets shot by an armored car destroying Gatling gun at point blank range – but this one doesn’t up the scale on simple pleasures of gore. If the Taken movies were about slick martial arts moves and gun-play, Rambo: Last Blood is akin to a kid banging a drum while yelling ‘America’ loudly. There is no elegance involved here – John Rambo has the bone headed elegance of a hammer landing on a face – quite literally.

Clearly this is a franchise that smells like a milk carton kept outside the fridge for three years and at no point does this film offer any redeeming quality. It’s only memorable moments are the end credits which employ an assortment of nostalgic slow motion shots from the original film – but they’re only notable because those shots remind you how awful this film is in comparison.