Rambo: From First to Last Blood
The original Rambo (which didn't have Rambo in the title) was an undervalued movie. It told the story of a war hero struggling to adapt to life in the civilian world who was pushed beyond his limits and retaliated against a system that was stacked against him. Good action sequences. Sylvester Stallone at his best. Jumping off the cliff, bouncing through the tree limbs and then sewing up his own arm?
Rambo: First Blood II was a completely different movie. Same guy, but a vastly changed scenario. This was Stallone at his steroid-fueled peak, chiseled and freakishly cut. Here he mowed through pretty much all of Vietnam and a military establishment that considered him expendable -- and sent him on a suicide mission.
Rambo III? I don't remember it at all. By the time it came out, the genre had worn thin. The world was a different place in 1988. Die Hard was the only "action movie" (and its a classic) that moved the needle. Bankable action star Arnold had moved on to Twins with Danny Devito rather than continue his Predator/Commando career arc. It did big box office, finishing top 20 for the year, but was pretty derivative. Felt like the character had run its course.
Rambo disappeared for 20 years when the better-than-I-expected film simply titled 'Rambo' showed up. This film found the beleaguered warrior wrestling cobras in the jungle, hiding from his past, trying to bury the violence that was his legacy. He was forced back into the fray by a vicious warlord and a naive but well-intentioned group of missionaries that were captured by his thugs. It was one of the more violent movies I've ever seen toward the end with multiple shots of legs, arms and torsos being blown apart. But I enjoyed it far more than I probably should have. I could actually see the Rambo character ending up exactly where he did, ditching society for a stripped-down jungle life.
That brings us to Rambo: Last Blood which, in my opinion, should never have been made. It begins with Rambo on some sort of ranch, wearing a fucking cowboy hat, riding a fucking horse. There's some half-baked backstory about how he took on the role of surrogate father for this hispanic teenager when her dad abandoned her. No explanation of how he left the jungle to become Josey Wales, no real exposition on how he met this family, how he came to take on the parental role, why he dug a bunch of fucking rat-tunnels on his property -- other than all those set pieces were needed to provide convenient plot points. It didn't come close to explaining how the guy got from sweaty jungle cobra wrangler to prancing cowpoke with an adopted family in the span of ten short years. It just didn't fit.
The story-telling was incredibly lazy. Doors were opened and then half closed without any realistic or rational motivation. It was just stupid. Particularly jarring was the "journalist" who rescued him from his first botched (and ignorant) effort to free his sorta-daughter from a dangerous group of pimps and gangsters. Other than allegedly moving the plot along, her character was a waste. Nothing but cheesy lines badly delivered.
Basic storyline: Teen quasi-daughter ignores "Uncle John's" ominous warnings and heads to Mexico to find her deadbeat dad and confront him over running out on her. Once there, she runs into trouble with a sex-trafficking ring headed by some cartoonish yahoos. Rambo heads across the border to start some shit. Things go badly. Sex traffickers are pissed off. Rambo does a Home Alone montage as he booby-traps his property and the traffickers are polite enough to wait until he's set all the Kevin-ish traps before they come after him. People die in creative ways.
I've always liked the Rambo character. This was just a complete affront to the history. Cowboy Rambo was a murderous, raging fuck. He mutilated people for sport. He made stupid decisions that cost people around him dearly.
This movie has no place in the Rambo pantheon. It should be scrubbed from existence and never mentioned again. It's the Caddyshack 2, the Christmas Vacation 2, the Christmas Story 2 of the Rambo series. It was just lazy, sloppy and pointless. I'm going to have to go back and re-watch First Blood to get this shit stain out of my mind.
It's time for Rocky, Creed and Rambo to go away and never return.
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