'Rambo: Last Blood’: Sylvester Stallone Leads A Manic MAGA Fever Dream & Radicalizing Recruitment Video [Review]

Everything about the Rambo franchise, and especially, the odiously hyper-violent “Rambo: Last Blood” betrays the character Sylvester Stallone helped popularize in the early 80s. Based on the novel by David Morrell, 1982’s “First Blood,” isn’t an action-filled portrait of an American hero fighting a foreign enemy. It’s an emotional, tragic look at a broken soldier coming home and grappling with the psychological trauma of war when there’s no one left to fight. It’s a genuinely sad commentary on the plight of veterans and PTSD and quite the good movie.

However, over the last 37 years, Rambo has grown as grotesque as Stallone’s bloated, over-steroid-juiced-up body on the new ‘Last Blood’ poster, morphing into a flag-waving, gun-toting symbol for angry Americans desperate to see the “bad guys” from other countries suffer. Typically, “Rambo: Last Blood” follows that trend to its inevitable conclusion, presenting a film that ditches any semblance of story and unabashedly pushes an intolerant xenophobic political agenda, that’ll allow justification for bigoted, hateful feelings because Sylvester Stallone says it’s ok.

To describe the ‘Last Blood’ in any details would be giving it more thought than director Adrian Grunberg and co-writers Matt Cirulnick and Stallone. John Rambo is an old farmer, who has become the de facto father figure for a young girl. When that young girl goes to Mexico to find her birth father, she gets kidnapped and is forced into prostitution. Rambo, of course, goes to Mexico, goes on the warpath to find her and bludgeons everything in his path.

With a paper-thin plot, it becomes readily apparent that this film is nothing more than a 99-minute commercial for the current President’s desire to paint the United States’ southern neighbor as a dangerous invader worth treating with suspicion and fear.

Jingoism is expected by now, given the history of the series, but ‘Last Blood’ takes extreme patriotism and adds a vulgar 2019 MAGA design flair to it. When John Rambo’s niece asks if it’s okay that she goes to Mexico, his immediate response is, “Why would you want to do that?” The tone and shocked look on Stallone’s face make it seem as if she just asked to join ISIS and not the tropical border country within driving distance of his home in Arizona.

When the film ventures into Mexico, the country is presented as a gang-filled wasteland, where each character is covered in tattoos, drinking beer, holding guns, and basically, looking like they walked right out of “scary Mexican MS-13 gangbanger” typecasting. And, besides one character whose sole purpose is to let John Rambo command her to do things, every other Mexican person in the film is presented as the rapists, drug dealers, and murderers that Donald Trump said are coming for your children. Except in ‘Last Blood,’ that twisted view is distorted into a gross reality.

None of this is new or unexpected to be fair. Previous “Rambo” films have also shown stereotypical, offensive versions of foreign enemies and treated outsiders as disposable garbage. However, ‘Last Blood’—appearing as if it’s a paid-for ad by Stephen Miller—takes things one troubling step further by hammering home its true ugly motivations. Pausing to show the main character driving through a rickety border fence, illustrating how easy it is for a man with an assortment of weapons and no driver’s license to get into the United States, ‘Last Blood’ is Steve Bannon’s wet dream and Breitbart News should be singing its praises any minute now.

‘Last Blood’ goes in hard on a similar White House and MAGA-like fear mongering too. When the bad guys make their way to Rambo’s farm in Arizona, the film makes an unsettlingly pointed effort to show another shot of the border fencing, once again, demonstrating how easy it is for therapists, murderers, and drug dealers to make their way to your home and harm your children.

Never fear, scared white people living in border states. Like radicalizing Fox News or NRA propaganda suggesting how to defend yourself, ’Last Blood’ shows that all you need is a full arsenal of shotguns, handguns, knives, bombs (because Rambo has this shit laying around everywhere obviously), and bow and arrows to defend your home from the evil Mexicans that are literally coming for you with the intent of murdering your whole family. And if a woman dares to step up and ask you what is going on, or attempts to dissuade you from your goal, then just command her to stop and tell her that you know better. Throughout the film, Rambo’s brusque, meat-pawed interactions with women are to either tell them they’re wrong or to force them into helping him because he’s always right, of course.

Regardless of the not-so-subtle political motivations and skin-crawling bigotry, ‘Last Blood’ ultimately fails even as a basic action movie. The pacing is atrocious, with the first hour of the film devoid of any excitement and instead filled with what might be one of Stallone’s worst performances to date. His Rambo in this film is monotone and stiff, but not in the typical Stallone way. No, in ‘Last Blood,’ it’s almost as if the actor is incredibly bored by the plot of the film (as is the audience) and saving all his energy for the batshit crazy finale.

And yes, the climax is the only reason why anyone would likely pay money to see this film (though that’s really sick and twisted in of itself). Instead of peppering a bit of tension and suspense throughout and building towards some crescendo of righteous personal vengeances—the kind that even the greatest pacifist would understand— it’s clear that 90% of the budget of the film went into the final 20 minutes, with all the explosions, gunfights, stabbings, and disembowelment you expect from a ‘Rambo’ movie comes into play. Its absurd nature is slightly entertaining when you’re not finding it abhorrent, but it’s all far too little, too late.

As an extended MAGA fever dream, “Rambo: Last Blood” is sure to excite particular, red hat-wearing audiences who shed a tear if a brown toddler rots in a cage. However, those looking for an even-semi thoughtful or well-crafted finale to one of the most iconic action franchises ever released, Stallone’s latest is an utter disappointment. Even a meaningful goodbye to audiences escapes Stallone. The final moments of the film suggest a ‘Last Blood…For Now,’ sabbatical from slaughtering brown people, so if this is where the series is headed, then no thanks. Had the movie been reversed, with Mexicans, brown, or Middle Eastern people like the protagonist, this unpleasant movie would easily be called a chilling recruitment video for terrorists, but for Stallone, it’s just another day in Rambo’s America. [D-]