Summary:
Rambo takes on Mexican drug cartels.
My Thoughts:
I’ve seen every Rambo movie made, so I knew it was only a matter of time before I went out of my way to see this film. The reviews for this were overwhelmingly negative, so I avoided seeing it in theaters, but those reviews also piqued my interest and made me seek this film out as soon as I could see it (without paying for it, of course).
How is this poor cartel member supposed to know who Rambo is asking about when he’s holding the picture facing towards himself?
While I won’t claim that any of the Rambo movies have great or lasting cinematic merit, I will say they are fun, and, to some extent, I suppose you could say I’m a fan of the series. The first entry, “First Blood”, is far more dramatic than one might expect, but it’s actually a decent movie. “Rambo: First Blood Part II” is where the series finds its legs and starts to stand as the hardcore action series it’s known as today; that entry actually has some decent action and it’s kind of a perfect time capsule of 80s action. “Rambo III” is just ridiculous; it’s where the series starts to loose its focus, but I’s also really dumb fun. The fourth entry, titled only “Rambo” is alright; it’s essentially just a remake of “Rambo: First Blood Part II”, except it’s set thirty years later and is infinitely more violent and gorier than the other earlier entries in the series. It had been ten years since the last Rambo, and I was interested to see what Stallone could bring to the table for this ‘final’ entry (if there’s still money coming in, they’ll make more).
Almost right away I could sense a sort of tonal difference between this entry and the rest of the Rambo franchise. While all the Rambo movies have featured their titular character struggling to overcome and avoid the violence of his past (before he’s inevitably dragged back in), this film seems to take Rambo’s (Sylvester Stallone, “Creed”) grieving process in a different direction. Instead of trying to live a normal life on his ranch (where the last entry left our hero), Rambo has instead spent his retirement building tunnels beneath his ranch, you know, just in case a cartel of murderous Mexican drug lords decides to raid his house and he has to defend himself… you know, normal retirement stuff. Another thing that’s different is that Rambo has always sort of been a loaner- he’s been hurt too many times before, so he just keeps his distance and only makes friends when he’s thrown into a situation that forces him to get close to people. This entry ditches Rambo’s loaner personality so that he is a now friend with a woman named Maria (Adriana Barraza, “Babel”) and Maria’s teenage granddaughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). After Gabrielle is kidnapped by the Mexican cartel and sold into sex slavery, Rambo takes a leaf out of Bryan Mills book and goes all “Taken” on the cartel, hunting them down in an attempt to save the girl. Thought that might sound somewhat interesting, the pacing is pretty rough, the dialogue is bad, and Stallone looks like he’s got a persistent, perpetual headache; the first two acts are straight up boring.
Some spoilers follow below. Honestly, the plot of this film is so simplistic it seems like it was written by a ten year old who just snuck into their first R rated movie. There’s nothing really to spoil.
SPOILERS
So, Rambo gets Gabrielle back, but she dies in his care because she’d been pumped full of drugs (sounds like a super light, super fun action movie, am I right?). Rambo, now filled with rage and being hunted by the cartel members who he didn’t kill, returns to his ranch, where he had thankfully spent the last ten years of his life booby-trapping his farm just in case a situation like this were to arise. The last twenty minutes of this film turn into a slasher film, just as violent, gritty, and gory as “Freddy vs Jason” or “Halloween H20”. The violence in the last part of the film is so mind-numbingly jarring compared to the other two thirds of the film, that it honestly felt like I was watching a different movie altogether. Limbs are lopped off; heads are severed; people are blown up; cars are crashed; people land in pits of spikes; it’s like “Home Alone” for horror fans. However, while I absolutely enjoyed that last scene and was cackling hysterically throughout it, it’s all executed horribly; certain sequences looked as if they could’ve been lifted right from a student film. To make matters worse, it still doesn’t feel anything like a Rambo movie; it feels like a “Friday the 13th” film except we’re supposed to be rooting for Jason. The ending, wherein Rambo shoots four arrows into the limbs of the final baddie before plunging a knife into his chest and ripping out his still-beating heart, felt like something that would’ve sounded cool in an 80s action script, sure, but almost forty years later, that kind of action comes off as incredibly schmaltzy, almost to the point of parody, and in the end, that’s sort of how this Rambo feels; like a parody of the rest of the series.
Verdict:
Well, I wasn’t expecting much, but this was worse than I expected. Even if you’ve already seen all the other Rambo movies, you don’t need to see this one.
Review Written By: