Director: Sylvester Stallone
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze, Matthew Marsden
Have I Seen it Before: Oh sure.
Did I Like It: I keep struggling to come up with a conclusive, unifying opinion about this movie. It’s probably unnecessary in the larger mythos of Rambo, but than again that’s true of every movie in the series including that for which he is probably most well-known, Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985).
It tries to bring the character to some kind of catharsis and redemption (indeed, a specifically religious one) to its main character, but at the same time can’t (and, if I’m being honest, probably shouldn’t) escape the series black heart, and still tries to leave things open for one more, even more bleak and embarrassing entry in the series.
And yet there’s a concerted effort to make a different kind of Rambo movie, here, and it’s surely to Stallone’s credit that this is the only film in the series which he helms himself. It’s somehow the most violent entry in the series (truly amazing, when glib, jingoistic carnage has been the most consistent fuel for each film) but that violence feels real. Others might find the verisimilitude of the viscera too much to handle and somehow less “fun” than what came before, but as unsure I am about the film, the one thing I am sure of is that those others are bad people. There is pain and terror with each splash of the bloodbath. It would be deeply insane to call this (or any of them) the most socially conscious Rambo film, but it is impossible to deny that Stallone has a visual perspective, understands the character—or what he has become in the cultural zeitgeist—and wants to do something with the film.
More so than any of the other films—aside from First Blood (1982)—this feels like a real, if flawed, film.
At least I won’t have to write a review of Rambo: Last Blood (2019) again. There’s only so much one can say about Rambo, right?