Rambo reaches new low

Rambo: Last Blood (R18, 99 mins) Directed by Adrian Grunberg Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★

Here’s a fun fact that I’ve just worked out: Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo only exists under Republican presidents.

The last Rambo film, the imaginatively titled and-not-toosucky-if-you-were-in-the-mood

Rambo came out in 2008, when Bush Jr was still in the White House. The first three instalments were released in 1982, 85 and 88, all on Reagan’s watch.

During the Clinton and Obama eras, there was not a peep out of Mrs Stallone’s boy’s second-most famous creation.

Does it mean anything? Probably not. But, coincidence or not, Rambo: Last Blood is very much a film with the political zeitgeist on its mind.

Rambo is living out his retirement on his late daddy’s farm, training horses, apparently keeping several cosmetic surgeons in clover and occasionally volunteering for search and rescue teams.

This latter trait provides for a promising opening stanza for Last

Blood, as Sly saves a young woman from a flash flood on some forested Arizona peak.

It’s a curious scene, in tone and a landscape seemingly from an entirely different film.

But it does allow one character to describe Rambo as, ‘‘’Nam collateral, but a hell of a tracker’’, which seemed to be pointing towards a film with maybe a little insight and humility to offer.

And Last Blood could and should have been Rambo’s Logan, his Unforgiven. But no.

Whatever promise the film held is gone immediately, in favour of a save-the-kidnapped-girl trope of such cliche I almost admired the sheer laziness and chutzpah it must have taken to write it.

Soon enough, after Stallone has taken a fearful beating at his first attempt to rescue his honorary niece, he succeeds in getting her back across the border from Mexico – where she had been kidnapped by a gang of Mexican people smugglers the likes of which we haven’t seen since Chuck Norris hung up his knuckledusters – only for tragedy to intervene.

At which point, the film heads into a final act that suggests

Rambo: Home Alone might have been a better title.

Sly has kitted out the farm with a series of tunnels – as you do – into which he lures the surviving villains to meet their ends via various sharp objects.

Director Adrian Grunberg (who made the pretty good Mel Gibson come-back vehicle Get The Gringo) has clearly been hoarding his budget for these scenes.

But by the end, after Sly has literally torn the heart out of the opposition, I wasn’t the only one of the dozen or so people in the theatre who burst out laughing.

And that is definitely not the reaction that Sly, Grunberg or any of the film’s investors will have been aiming for.

With a bit more effort and a lot less xenophobia, Last Blood might have closed out the nearly fourdecade franchise in style.

As it is, this film is a lazy mess with no real reason to exist.