In the Flesh: Rambo: Last Blood

First Blood, the 1982 action-thriller based on David Morrell's novel of the same name and directed by Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright, Weekend at Bernie's), is the definitive post-Vietnam movie. It reckons with deep humanity with the government's abandonment of veterans, with the soul-scarring horrors of war, and with the inferiority complexes and violent dispositions endemic to American police officers. It's a deeply anti-social movie, pushing through suburban small-mindedness and into the life-ruining aftereffects of violence. In the movie's final moments Stallone's sad-eyed, wire-tense Rambo breaks open after uttering no more than a few dozen lines throughout the rest of the film. Sobbing and stammering, he recounts attempting to put his friend's shredded body back together after an IED attack in a Saigon bar. It's one of the most gruesome and painful scenes of that deeply troubled decade.

Last Blood, Adrian Grunberg's 2019 conclusion to the saga of John Rambo, is a truck commercial starring your dad's fantasies of killing Mexicans to rescue his daughter. The most interesting things about it are Stallone's battered, time-worn face and softly lisping voice. Beyond that there's nothing but xenophobia and incoherent camera work. The shots of the network of tunnels under Rambo's family farm are slipshod and disorienting, chopping the complex space into shivering bite-sized frames impossible to relate to one another. Every moment of action in the film is similarly lazy, filmed in shaky close-up or on some artless slant. The violence is grisly as a matter of course. In one scene Rambo pulls a man's collarbone through his skin. In another he threatens to kill a young Mexican woman unless she tells him where his niece is.

There aren't really any characters in the movie beyond Rambo himself, who exists here solely because of Stallone's natural presence. The rest are machines to make Rambo feel a certain way or meat for Rambo to rip apart. The clockwork inevitability of the film's final act in which Rambo singlehandedly murders a Mexican gang at his family farm, each trap he springs prepared Home Alone-style onscreen, drives home how little interest this movie has in human nature. There's no way to know anything about anyone except by their most heinous acts of violence and their convenient monologues about how bad they are and how little they value women, unlike Rambo who is a good big boy. It's jaw-dropping to remember that First Blood features no actual killing on Rambo's part.

Last Blood exists so that dads can imagine how incredibly they'd spring into action if their families were threatened. It's a fantasy of limitless violence, about the family you secretly resent finally being torn away so that you can become your truest, most viciously competent self in some morally unimpeachable metamorphosis. It's a stupid movie, venal and ugly, and it cheapens a character whose genesis resides in the idea that all human life holds inherent value and that the horrors of war are ultimately something to regret, not something to take pride in, much less to bring home.