Director: Adrian Grünberg
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Adriana Barraza
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Reviews were pretty toxic so it just floated right past me.
Did I Like It: And I’m not entirely certain it deserves such a toxic review. It is no worse than my memories of the next most recent entry in the series, Rambo (2008), and I’d challenge another series whose clear heyday was in the 80s to make an entry that doesn’t serve to completely embarrass everyone involved. John Rambo kills a lot of people in an endless series of squib explosions and with an uncontrollable ferocity. It’s not like the recipe for one of these films is complex. One might feel the need to complain about the racist undercurrent through the film, but that probably disingenuously ignoring the rest of the franchise.
I say the movie only manages to avoid complete embarrassment, because it isn’t like I don’t feel a little bit bad for Stallone at the end of this one. For anyone looking for anything remotely on the same scale as Ryan Coogler’s Creed (2015), prepare yourself for disappointment. Then again, those constantly expecting a film as good as Creed are going to spend the majority of their movie-going time living with disappointment. Did we need to know more about what happened to John Rambo (Stallone) after he returned to his family home? Better yet, did we need this film to leave things open for yet another improbably sequel? The story seems so incidental to the character as depicted in First Blood (1982) that I can’t help but wonder if this was a script languishing in some B-movie producers library before someone got around to doing a Control-F and replacing Rambo with a role that could have easily been played by any aging action star.
I can’t seem to find any reference to back it up, but I have the strongest memory that at some point that there was plan to have Rambo square off with an alien invader. Now that would have been a film worth writing home about.