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: YOUNG AMERICANS in the SHADOW of DEATH!

Dragonwolf (2013): I quite enjoyed director Raimund Huber's earlier movie Kill 'em All as the kind low budget production not overstaying its welcome and realizing what it can do on its budget, and what not. Dragonwolf on the other hand, is an ill-advised attempt at creating some sort of comic book style martial arts epic. Consequently, the terrible acting becomes a problem, as does the horrible dialogue, the idiotic plot, and the fact that there's barely anything happening on screen that is either stupid or badly executed. Most of the time, it's even both.

Add to this the film's just as ill-advised length of two terrible, painful hours, and find me crying in a corner.

The Cater Street Hangman (1998): This adaptation of Anne Perry's first Inspector Pitt Mystery, on the other hand, knows quite well what it's doing. If I were in a complaining mood, I'd probably argue that director Sarah Helling does overemphasise the source's melodramatic elements a bit, and the script by T.R. Bowen slightly underemphasises some of the book's seedier elements, but the film gets Perry's anger at all kinds of social injustice as right as it does her moments of compassion even with some of the people complicit in these injustices, so I'd be complaining about something very minor here.

Keeley Hawes and Eoin McCarthy make a very fine Charlotte Ellison and Thomas Pitt, respectively, too, so there's little about the film that's not to like.

Direct Contact (2009): And here I thought I had developed a high tolerance for contemporary direct-to-DVD action films. Turns out, it's only a high tolerance for contemporary direct-to-DVD action films that are actually any good. The saddest thing about the Dolph Lundgren vehicle at hand is that it has some production values: there's a helicopter, a tank, and quite a few henchmen wobbling around in diverse locations; there's even a plot that could be vaguely interesting. Unfortunately, director Danny Lerner is rather terrible, managing to make everyone involved look just as terrible: Dolph is as stiff as he hasn't been in decades, Michael Paré looks bored, and the rest of the cast give the impression of people waiting on instructions that just don't come. Worse, for this sort of movie, while Lerner doesn't go for the lame show-off editing and staging style of action I hate with a passion, he demonstrates that you produce just as crappy action scenes while holding the camera still. There's no heft to any of the action, the editing makes everyone look slow, and even worse, it's so sloppily shot there's barely an action scene not ruined by continuity problems that rob the action of all rhythm; the direction’s additional attempts at “style” are just laughable.

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In short: Getaway (2013)

Warning: this is not to be confused with various other movies called The Getaway, but believe me, you wouldn't.

Second warning: Getaway might have annoyed me so much I'm going to suggest there would be little difference between director Courtney Solomon's efforts and that of a stuffed monkey.

The wife (Rebecca Budig) of former race car and later escape car driver Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke, who needed the money, one hopes) is kidnapped by an evil nameless mastermind (a role so difficult, the film has to use unpleasant close-ups of Jon Voight's face and the voice of Paul Freeman to embody him, because a single actor could not be clichéd yet boring enough for this particular masterpiece of filmmaking). Mastermind then has Brent race all around Sofia in a stolen car as part of a loud, car-crashing fiendish evil plan. Because our villain is especially cruel, he also has Brent pick up the actual owner of the car, a girl without a name (played by Selena Gomez who probably has youth as her excuse) who just happens to be the most annoying person who ever lived; also, she's of course a car freak and computer wiz and the daughter of the boss of a very large investment bank.

Lots of car crashes ensue; stupidity never stops.

Generally, I'd love to be the one to say that Getaway, despite what everyone else on the Internet says, is actually a misunderstood hidden gem. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep a straight face for a lie this huge for very long.

As you probably understand, Getaway is stupid on a level that makes even the worst of Luc Besson's Europa Corp productions look well thought out and intelligent. The big difference is that Besson's movies generally show some (sometimes even more) imagination sandwiched between the idiocies - though it's often a very stupid kind of imagination - whereas Getaway's imagination stops at "car crash fun, hurr hurr".

Which, you know, still could result in an entertaining movie if the director responsible (and I mean responsible), Courtney Solomon, who just happens to also carry the blame for the first Dungeons & Dragons film, would even demonstrate the faintest idea of how to film car chases in an exciting, possibly even varied manner, seeing that about ninety percent of his movie consist of…wait for it…car chases. Clearly, he doesn't, so we get a lot of fast cuts between unexciting shots, and the sort of action choreography which not just doesn't bother to clearly show what's going on but is so misguided I'm pretty convinced nobody involved in the staging of these scenes knows what's supposed to be going on in them themselves. What's even worse: nothing on screen suggests any ideas about any other aspect of filmmaking either.

I'm not usually somebody to say you could probably have replaced a director with a stuffed monkey, but really, how could the resulting film be worse than what Solomon's Getaway delivers?

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