Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for the long-awaited (and final?) sequel Rambo: Last Blood.
In the early 2000s, Sylvester Stallone was looking for a real world conflict to serve as the basis for the fourth film in the Rambo franchise, and one of the issues that stood out to him was the number of women that were being killed in northern Mexico. One major example of this are the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, a city right across the border from El Paso, Texas, connected to El Paso by four points of entry. The estimate is that more than 370 women were killed in Ciudad Juárez between 1993 and 2005. For a while, Stallone considered writing a fourth Rambo that would find the character home in Arizona, having to cross the border to try to save a female acquaintance from drug runners / human traffickers in Mexico. He ended up setting that concept aside when he learned of the decades-long civil war in Burma. The 2008 film Rambo found that Stallone's character John J. Rambo had been living in Thailand for the twenty years since Rambo III, dropped him into the middle of the Burma war, and ended with him going home to Arizona, long after he left to fight in the Vietnam War.
The ending of that film, showing Rambo walking down the driveway to his father's ranch, could have been the perfect, peaceful ending to the Rambo franchise. We first saw Rambo walking down the road in America in First Blood, so having him come back home after the events of that film, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo III, and Rambo nicely brought things full circle. But putting Rambo back in Arizona also perfectly set up that Mexico idea Stallone had previously. So soon after the release of Rambo, Stallone started talking about taking the character to Mexico for a fifth film.
Then, for some reason, we had to sit through a decade of Stallone going back and forth on whether or not he wanted to play Rambo again. He would say a fifth film was in the works, then he would say he was retiring from the role. Along the way, alternative stories were considered. One that Stallone promoted sounded completely off base to me: it would have been a sci-fi horror film along the lines of Predator, based on the novel Hunter by James Byron Huggins. A novel Stallone has held the rights to for a long time, but hasn't done anything with. In Rambo V: The Savage Hunt, an "inhuman beast", the result of genetic experiments, would bust loose somewhere around the Arctic Circle, and Rambo and his much younger hunting partner Beau Brady (this always seemed like an odd pairing of names, Rambo and Beau) would be brought in to track and kill the beast before it reaches civilization, getting some assistance from a Special Forces Kill Team that surely would have been used as cannon fodder. After spending some time on that idea, Stallone dismissed it as "silly fan fiction". Then Stallone teamed with screenwriter Sean Hood for a script titled Rambo: Last Stand, said to be a "small town thriller" like First Blood. But eventually, Stallone went back to where he started from, the Mexico idea, and crafted the screenplay for what became Rambo: Last Blood with Matthew Cirulnick, the creator of an Amazon series called Absentia, and Passenger 57 writer Dan Gordon.
While Stallone had directed Rambo himself, the first time he directed a film in this franchise, he decided to hand the directorial duties over to someone else on Last Blood, and chose Adrian Grunberg, a filmmaker who had a lot of experience working in Mexico. Not only did he direct a Mexico-set film called Get the Gringo, starring Mel Gibson, he also worked as second unit director on several projects that filmed in Mexico, including Tony Scott's Man on Fire and the TV series Narcos. He was second unit director on Jack Reacher: Never Go Back as well, but that didn't film in Mexico.
Rambo: Last Blood finally reached theatres in September of 2019, eleven and a half years after Rambo. Eleven and a half years that went by very quickly for me, but still, it was a longer wait than I had been hoping for when I first heard that Stallone was talking about making a fifth Rambo movie. There was more disappointment when Last Blood reached theatres, as it was revealed that the theatrical cut we got in the US and UK was much shorter than the version other countries got; 89 minutes instead of 101 minutes. With that in mind, I couldn't justify going to see Last Blood on the big screen, knowing I wasn't getting the full movie, and knowing that the absence of the character moments that had been hacked out of the shorter cut had left some viewers confused about the relationships. The set-up had been removed. Thankfully, the 101 minute cut has since been released on home video so fans in all countries can have a chance to see the complete version of the film.
In the opening sequence (which was cut out of the 89 minute version), we learn that Rambo is still living in Arizona, and during his time there he was been helping people by volunteering to assist the authorities in search and rescue situations. The first 5 minutes of the movie involve Rambo riding his horse into the wilderness in an attempt to save a trio of hikers from a flash flood. It doesn't go as well as he hoped, but he does have the opportunity to save a grateful person from a wall of rushing water - and it's insane to me that the distributors in the US and the UK would choose to cut action out of an action movie. When Rambo returns home to his father's horse ranch, he sits down for a chat with his housekeeper Maria (Adriana Barraza) an employee originally hired by his father, who has passed away. During this conversation, we not only see that Rambo and Maria are good friends and get the information that Rambo's father is gone, we also see the psychological toll that losing a couple of the hikers had on Rambo, a loss that he adds to the long list of losses that have been on his mind since Vietnam.
After speaking with Maria, Rambo goes to the maze of tunnels he has dug beneath the ranch property, which would be a sure sign that he is still a deeply troubled person, even if we didn't get visual flashes of the bad things going on in his head, which we will. It isn't until this first scene in the tunnels ends that the extended cut reaches the moment that was the beginning of the US and UK theatrical cut. The theatrical cut was missing a moment here and there after this, but the opening was the biggest chunk that was removed.
We do get the idea that Rambo has found some level of peace while living in Arizona. He had people to interact with, and through the workers on the ranch had something of a family life. Maria has a granddaughter named Gabriela (Yvette Monreal) who refers to Rambo as "Uncle John", and it's obvious that he loves and cares for her as a niece. Gabriela's mother died of cancer and her abusive father left years ago - and it's disappointing to hear that Rambo had to deal with being around a scumbag like Gabriela's dad Manuel (Marco de la O), who he once had to drag off of Maria's daughter because he was beating her with a belt, when he was supposed to be relaxing at home. When Stallone was trying to come up with an idea for the fourth movie, one option on the table would have had Rambo living in America, a married family man. I can't see that ever being a possibility for the character, but this movie finds the right middle ground. He has a family, but it's not one he made through getting married and having kids. He can communicate the people he's close to, Maria and Gabriela, but it's said that he freaks out Gabriela's friends because he has a tendency to stare at them. He has been domesticated slightly, but he's not the happy family man next door.
Gabriela just graduated from high school, and before she heads off to college she had it in her head that she wants to go to Mexico to see her father, regardless of how awful he was in the past. Rambo and Maria both warn her not to seek Manuel out, but she doesn't listen, and that's why the rest of the movie happens. Not only does Manuel break Gabriela's heart when she tries to visit him, but her bad influence friend Gizelle (Fenessa Pineda) sells her out to a drug-and-human-trafficking cartel headed up by brothers Hugo Martinez (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) and Victor Martinez (Óscar Jaenada). When Rambo and Maria realize that Gabriela is missing and obviously went to Mexico, Rambo crosses the border to retrieve her. To say this does not go well would be an understatement.
When Rambo goes to Mexico, he is not in the heavily armed warrior mode we remember from other sequels, he does not wage one-man war on the cartel on their turf. Maybe he would have done that if the film had been made in previous decades, but you can tell Stallone was interested in switching up the style if he made a fifth film. That's why he considered something along the lines of First Blood or The Savage Hunt, this was never going to be another "one-man army" entry in the franchise. Some viewers have said this "doesn't feel like a Rambo movie", but that's just because it's a different kind of Rambo movie that we've been accustomed to. I don't think there's anything wrong with taking the character and putting him into a different sub-genre of action, within reason. The Savage Hunt would have shaken things up too much and strayed too far away from the heart of the series, which is an examination of a character who was traumatized by a real war, and each film stood on a foundation of real world issues and conflicts. You can't stick a genetic experiment monster into the line-up. But you can put Rambo in a revenge thriller, as Stallone and his collaborators did with Last Blood. And they sure give Rambo plenty of motivation to seek revenge, and give the viewer plenty of reason to root for him to destroy the Martinez brothers.
Rambo does not have an easy go of it, and might be dead halfway into the film if he didn't get some aid from Carmen Delgado (Paz Vega), a journalist who has been investigating the Martinez brothers for personal reasons: her own sister was one of their victims. But even though Rambo is no longer in his prime, there are still some badass sequences in here as he and the cartel go back and forth against each other. In one of Rambo's most successful moments in Mexico, he's armed with nothing but a hammer, and the film builds up to a gleefully violent, blood-soaked final confrontation on the ranch property and down in those tunnels. Stallone was aware of how well the gore went over in the previous movie, and he wisely brought it back here. This isn't as messy as Rambo was, but it features some nice gore of its own.
The movie goes further than it needed to, as far as I'm concerned. Rambo has to deal with something so devastating, it's up there with the heartbreak Charles Bronson was dealt in the Death Wish franchise. I remember watching one of the Death Wish movies with my grandmother, and she lamented the fact that "that poor man, he can never be happy". The same could be said for Rambo. In the years between the fourth film and this one, he came the closest he had ever been to happiness since we met him, and this movie rips that away from him. Did it have to rip it away so harshly? It's already sad that Rambo ever felt it necessary to kill another person after returning to America, but this movie really piles on the heartache.
I like Rambo: Last Blood. I think it's a really good action flick and I'm glad it was made, because I wanted to see the "Rambo vs. a cartel" idea brought to the screen ever since I first saw Stallone mention it in an interview in 2008. I thought Rambo's ending was the perfect ending to the franchise, but if Stallone wanted to make another one, I was there for it. If there's one negative feeling I have about Last Blood's existence, it's that it took away the hope Rambo had at the ending of the fourth movie. When that movie ended, you could imagine him living a good life at that ranch. Now we know that good life won't last long, and there is no hope in the ending of Last Blood.
Last Blood is downbeat enough that it makes me want to see Stallone make another sequel that might give Rambo a better ending than he receives in this movie. Stallone has floated an idea out there. Since Rambo is of Native American heritage, Stallone has said, "The only place he could actually go where he could survive would be a reservation. That's the only place, because (the police) can't come on, it's Federal. That's the only place he could go and heal, other than that he's done." But rather than developing the idea of a movie about Rambo staying on a reservation, Stallone is once again saying that he has retired from the character.
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