Ruminations on Rambo: Last Blood

There is so much blood in Rambo: Last Blood (Adrian Grunberg, 2019). Viewers will also enjoy plentiful entrails and brains splattered all over the screen in an orgy of violence unseen since . . . well, Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, 2008). This time around, Rambo lives on an isolated farm somewhere close to Mexico. He resides with a kindly matronly woman and college-aged Carmen, who Rambo has taken under his wing after her real father abandoned her. 

Alas, Carmen goes to Mexico, depicted as a seething pit of drug dealers, murderers, rapists, and human traffickers, to find her biological father. Find him she does, and in a tragically hilarious scene, she asks him why he abandoned his family. Bio-dad uses just a few words to say, essentially, "I didn't care about either one of you, so I left. You can go now." And then he slams the door in her face. Distraught, Carmen goes out for a drink only to be sold into prostitution. 

And so begins the real plot, such as it is - Rambo's rescue mission. Surprisingly, though Rambo does rescue Carmen by killing a whole bunch of goons with nothing but a claw hammer, she doesn't survive the ordeal (why she dies after being rescued is left somewhat ambiguous). So Rambo holes up at his ranch, knowing the human traffickers are going to come after him. He sets up a bunch of comical booby traps straight out of Home Alone, and pretty much murders 40 or 50 people. He sets some on fire, pokes a spike into one's skull, watches other fall into pit traps (spikes exit their unfortunate bodies in some very uncomfortable places), twice blows a head in half, etc. etc. 

If you're in the mood for amazingly silly, over-the-top violence and you're willing to overlook or ignore the fundamentally xenophobic premise, then, well, the blood lasts and lasts until you might feel as though there's none left to spill.

I really feel like Sylvester Stallone's career is building to a Rambo/Rocky team-up movie. He'll play both parts and get another Oscar nomination.

Rocky/Rambo: Blood, Sweat, & Fears