Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ on Amazon Prime, Sylvester Stallone’s Last Word on His Infamous Character

Rambo: Last Blood arrives on Amazon Prime like an arrow through one temple and out the other and hitting the drywall with your brain impaled and hanging there, dripping gore all over the wallpaper. The fifth movie in the series — why does it feel like the seventh? — made about $90 million during its theatrical run, and star Sylvester Stallone says it’s likely the final word on the character who only had about 17 words in his vocabulary (that’s not counting the array of unintelligible grunts). It depicts a graying, clean-cut Rambo who’s ready to put all the decapitating and disemboweling behind him, and his trademark red headband has been retired and put in the Smithsonian, no doubt. But the movie will surely deliver all the grody violence we’ve come to expect from the franchise, right?

RAMBO: LAST BLOOD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: John Rambo is an old man living on his father’s remote Arizona ranch with his housekeeper Maria (Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), who calls him “Uncle John” and is about to go off to college. Maria knew Rambo’s dad, and since Rambo was in the Vietnam War, that would make him about 70 years old, so she’d be about 90, even though the actress playing her is 64. Somehow Rambo maintains the property, with its horses and expanses of land and on-site housekeeper and network of underground tunnels complete with a gigantic forge and anvil for making really sharp knives that can slice through a man’s head like a Ginsu through a ripe tomato. So we assume he made a buck for each bad guy he slaughtered in the other movies, thus rendering him as rich as Bill Gates, and here I must implore myself to STOP DOING MATH, YOU’RE WATCHING A RAMBO MOVIE. Unless you’re counting the bodies.

Wait, you’re almost certainly thinking, a network of tunnels? Yeah. A network of tunnels. Tunnels that Gabrielle explains away: “My uncle likes to dig, and he’s a little bit crazy.” But we’re not gonna eat that slab of bologna, are we? The actual reason they exist is, Rambo’s a paranoiac who surely dreams of using them in case some bad guys come to get him in the third act of the movie, and he can rig them with terrifying booby traps and explosives designed to maim the living crud out of a bunch of greasy cretins who kidnapped Gabrielle and forced her into sexual slavery, of course. Duh! He spends a lot of time in the tunnels, hammering this and cranking that, and he even sleeps down there with all the centipedes, because they listen without judgment, and are the only friends a mono-slab like Rambo can have.

Anyway, who are these bad guys? Well, these permasweaty sleaze merchants hail from the xenophobic version of Mexico, which means they’re a bunch of drug-snorting caricatures apparently lifted from the racist Donald Trump speech about rapists and drug dealers. Why are they coming to Rambo’s Retirement Ranch to get Rambo? I’m not going to get into too many spoilery details, but I will say they EFFED WITH THE WRONG GRINGO. The same gringo with ominous canisters full of MAGNESIUM SHARDS just sitting on the pantry shelf; who can still put an arrow smack in the middle of the Jack of Hearts’ heart; who still sees the world as a place where “dere’s nuttin’ good out dere” and responds in kind. They drew first blood, and Rambo’s gonna have the last word on drawing blood.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Perhaps you’ll recall how 1988’s Rambo III averaged more than one kill per minute, and was labeled the most violent movie ever made. Notoriously, 2008’s Rambo more than doubled the death total. You might say this franchise is truly innovative in its excessive depiction of brutality — so it’s weird to see Last Blood tone down the death toll to a few dozen, cop its plot from Taken and throw in a sequence where Rambo puts the not-nice end of a hammer in the not-nice places of a bunch of human traffickers, just like Joaquin Phoenix does in You Were Never Really Here.

Performance Worth Watching: (Grunts)

Memorable Dialogue: “Ung jus tryna keep a lid onnit. Erryday.” — Rambo’s lament

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: South Park couldn’t have done a better caricature of a Rambo movie. Tongue not in cheek at all — more like tongue ripped out and pitched into the Cuisinart — Stallone, who co-wrote the screenplay, looks carved out of granite, and is as inexpressive as ever. Rambo still walks softly and carries a knife with a hollow handle filled with matches, a long wire that can act as a saw, a fish hook and line, some bandages, a tube of antibiotic ointment, a tent that sleeps 16, a generator and an emergency s’mores kit. And he still knows how to jam it not just into, but THROUGH a bad guy’s face, then into his torso a few times, and then he breaks his neck just to be sure. (You can’t say he ain’t thorough.) This is the type of movie that features three scenes of torture just in the first half, one of which will impassion compound-fracture fetishists like never before.

Say what you will about a slab of Mel Gibson-directed grotesque violence — like maybe Apocalypto — it’s got filmmaking chops, OTT style and a kind of icky vigor you can’t wrench yourself away from. Comparatively, Last Blood is rote, dimly lit, hacked up for barbecue in the editing room, barely comprehensible and stapled together with three montages, two of which feature lots of archery flexes and knife blades grinding on stones, and the other is a Rambo-heals-from-a-beating sequence set to two synth lines played in the key of PAIN.

Stallone and director Adrian Grunberg bullseye a humorless tone within a ludicrous scenario, and the only meager joy I gleaned from it was seeing a heavily armed Stallone pirouette back and forth over the wall-less border with ease, right here in Trump’s America. Structurally, the story is stripped down to the barest components of rampant brooding and even more rampant vengeful murder. I worry Stallone has eroded all the goodwill he scraped together with his Oscar-nominated return as palookaville hero Rocky Balboa in Creed. It’s grim. It looks cheap. It’s pretty much racist. It ends with slo-mo highlights from old Rambos. It’s no fun whatsoever. It’s as enjoyable as a trip to the dentist in a horror movie.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Rambo: Last Blood is Disney World for sadists.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Rambo: Last Blood on Amazon Prime