SHOULDA STAYED ON THE FARM
Rambo still slavishly mirrors US tensions, unfortunately, writes Kavish Chetty
Iwonder how many times Sylvester Stallone has suffered the professional hazard of being punched in the head during his five-decade career in action cinema. In his fifth and final outing as Vietnam veteran John Rambo, the ursine actor shows the full range of symptoms associated with an undiagnosed concussion. It’s difficult to make out what he’s saying as he delivers lines in his signature, gravelly mumble. On his tongue, whole sentences are scrambled into a flap-eared omelette of incomprehensibility. And, being the manliest of all men, he doesn’t indulge such feminine affectations as facial expressions or registering emotion. His face barely moves throughout the movie. Instead, he conserves each drop of energy for punching, throttling and stabbing — a bloodthirsty repertoire from which he frequently borrows.
We find Rambo a late-life loner, living on an isolated ranch in Arizona. He’s a haunted war hero who’s in need of a visit to the psychologist’s office, but he belongs to a generation of men who can’t talk about their feelings and can only express their inner torments in the language of lowthroated growls and impromptu acts of needless carpentry around the house.
He whiles away his time tinkering in the catacombs beneath his farmstead and brushing his horses on the sprawling fields. It’s a postcard picture of American libertarianism. He even has a surrogate niece, Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). One glimpse of her, doe-eyed and eminently kidnappable, and it’s clear she’ll be assigned the role of victim, something to bring Rambo out of retirement.
Over the years, the Rambo films have functioned as the propaganda wing of the US entertainment industry, the enemies and baddies shifting in alignment with the country’s geopolitical tensions. First Blood,
1982, was a semi-honest attempt to the tell the story of the derangement of war veterans. But after that, each sequel became an all-purpose national mascot. From Vietnam to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, the troubled war veteran was quickly eclipsed in favour of an invincible, monosyllabic action star.
But in 2019, Cold War antagonisms are a thing of the past and we’re living under the reign of a new cohort of cinematic foes — the Islamic terrorists, the suspicious immigrants, and the international extortionists and drug cartels. It is the last group who are portrayed in this film.
Mexicans abduct Gabrielle after she crosses state lines in search of her real father. This leads to a south-of-the-border road trip during which Rambo inflicts his military-grade cruelty on every Mexican gangbanger in sight. Idyllic images of the Arizona countryside give way to cramped ganglands with tattooed, liquor-swilling thugs on every street corner. The country is portrayed as a relentlessly corrupt, sepiatoned, third-world hellhole. And from the vantage of their hilly mansions, the
Martinez brothers, the greasy-haired bad guys, gaze out at the lands below, while their AK47-wielding heavies patrol the swimming pools of their palatial estate. These guys snort so much cocaína, Scarface would have a hard time keeping up.
So what can you expect from an evening at the cinema in the company of Mr Rambo? For one thing, an extraordinary amount of pleasureless violence. In a standout scene, Rambo gouges the bone from a man’s chest using the righteous power of his mighty thumb. Elsewhere, he brandishes a hammer against his assailants in a DIY approach to revenge. When he gets beaten within an inch of his life, he takes a four-day power nap and comes back with shotguns and enough artillery to quell a minor civil war.
I like action movies. A good one brims with kinetic energy and tension, the fight scenes spectacularly choreographed to keep your adrenaline sloshing. But Rambo’s goodbye mission is the opposite: dull and predictable. There isn’t a second of genuine entertainment to be found here.
If what you’re looking for is a Mexicanflavoured thriller, you’re better off with Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario or its sequel, Day
of the Soldado. As for Rambo: Last Blood ,I think he’s best left on his rocking chair, to reflect on the passing of an era of American masculinity. The one-dimensional action heroes he apotheosises no longer make sense in a brave, new world.
Rambo: Last Blood is on circuit
He belongs to a generation who can only express their inner torments in acts of needless carpentry around the house