In short: Rambo: Last Blood (2019)

Elderly mass murderer John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), suffering from his usual bouts of PTSD and mumbling about the darkness inside of him, has retired to a horse ranch in Arizona. He has somehow managed to acquire a little replacement family in form of Maria Beltran (Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). Gabrielle’s mother having died years ago, and her father having disappeared from her life, Rambo has taken on a bit of father role and the official title of “Uncle John”.

He’s also dug an extensive tunnel system below the ranch, just in case he’s ever gonna need it for the action-packed climax of a movie. Let’s just call them Chekhov’s Tunnels.

Secretly, with the help of a rather dubious friend who lives in Mexico, Gabrielle has been searching for the whereabouts of her father. Eventually, she finds his contact address and runs off to visit him. He turns out to be a total prick, but at least, unlike her friend, he isn’t selling her to the Cartels as future drug-addicted prostitute.

As soon as Rambo realizes what has happened, he goes after Gabrielle, but he’s only able to bring her back home dead. He’s no Liam Neeson, apparently. The inevitable revenge killing spree ensues.

Adrian Grünberg’s supposedly final (I believe that when Stallone dies without making another one) entry into the Rambo franchise sits in a rather awkward place, at once trying to be very serious movie doing very serious character stuff and the kind of film that ends in a bit of gory violence, and not surprisingly ending up not succeeding at either one of it. I much prefer John Rambo, which simple wanted to be a brutal little action movie with a guy who looks like a weather-beaten rock formation in the title role, and succeeded at that supposedly simpler goal.

This rather more ambitious film can’t even pace itself right, taking over an hour to do not much more than introduce a handful of characters and get a seventeen year old girl killed, seemingly convinced of the profundity of its character work even though it doesn’t actually do more than other action films manage in an economical fifteen minutes. I’m also not at all happy about the decision to turn the film into a revenge tale in the end, where showing Rambo protecting actual living people would suggest at least some character development beyond the “woe is me! the darkness!” business the film finds so inexplicably interesting. That would also turn the film into something slightly different from the tale of a guy who does the same bloody crap again and again, as well as provide the climax with stakes somewhat higher than the question if Rambo will survive and kill everyone or kill everyone and survive. All of this, of course, wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the film had committed itself to be a blunt action movie – but once you go the road towards a supposed exploration of character, you then need to actually deliver it.


The action movie bits – taking up about fifteen to twenty minutes or so of the running time – are decent enough, rather gory, but presented with bland professionalism that hinders them from becoming exciting. The lack of interesting villains doesn’t help here, either, but then, this version of Rambo isn’t a particularly interesting hero either.

Three Films Make A Post: The most corrupt cop you've ever seen on screen.

211 (2018): To be honest, going into a contemporary movie with Nicolas Cage I do tend to hope it provides the great, strange actor with opportunity to do great, strange acting, so when I encounter him in a more bread and butter action thriller like York Alec Shackleton’s 211, I do find myself a little disappointed. However, if you are able to get over that little problem, you may find this to be very decent film. Shackleton’s direction is a bit too network TV like to really thrill me, but the film’s story is clearly told, and clear effort is  put into characterizing everyone involved, certainly putting this above the level of a lot of low budget shoot ‘em ups.

It’s not really the film’s fault I’d rather watch something crazier than this perfectly decent little number.

Coyote Lake (2019): Sara Seligman’s film about a mother-daughter duo (Adriana Barraza and Camila Mendes) who run a bed-and-breakfast practically on the US/Mexican border which they use to murder, rob and drown men working for the cartels, isn’t exactly a crazy film either. But here, the insistence on telling a tale that would usually make for a pretty extreme exploitation movie by avoiding practically all exploitative elements one way or the other, and instead focussing on a pretty horrible mother-daughter relationship, is actually what makes it interesting as well as pretty admirable. Seligman has a good grip on the elements of the material she has chosen to focus on, the actors are doing very good work (which is particularly important in a film that’s not at all focussing on the violence inherent in the material), so things come together nicely, creating an unassumingly effective film about family, freedom and weaponized capitalism.


Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): The second Spider-Man film taking place in the MCU with Tom Holland – and again directed by Jon Watts – is a strange little (huge) film. It is strange in the best way, daring a weird teen comedy vibe, destroying beautiful European cities as seen through US tourist eyes and using well-loved  elements of the Spider-Man myth and the MCU to goof off. Frankly, all of this shouldn’t work at all, and while this is indeed a surprisingly messy film whose structure doesn’t bode well for the MCU-less future of our friendly neighbourhood wallcrawler, it is also a whole lot of fun, suggesting a bit more of a freewheeling approach than typical in this kind of blockbuster realm.