An Ultra Conservative Fever Dream

I knew going into the Rambo series that, at a certain point, we’d reach a film that was so awful, so stupid, that it showed just why the character is a joke. Rambo III wasn’t exactly high art, and there are cartoonish moments that lend themselves well to parody, but a kind reading of the film at least can point out that even when, in the long run, its politics were bad it at least tried. The fourth film, Rambo (or John Rambo, if you prefer), also made an attempt at tackling serious political concerns in the world, pointing out an ongoing atrocity people needed to pay attention to, even if it then undercut its own message with such graphic, cartoonish violence that it lost the whole plot. Still, these films tried and while audiences may not have cared much about Rambo as his films went on, attempts can still be appreciated for what they are.

The same cannot be said for the fifth (and if we’re all lucky, final) final in the series, Rambo: Last Blood. I’m sure in Sylvester Stallone’s head he was making a film that tackled a political topic near and dear to him. The issue is that Sly went down the MAGA political hole and when it came time to make another Rambo film, he tapped into all the dark and foreboding alt-right talking points that he was hearing (presumably while he had Fox News and their ilk on in the background while he wrote the script).

The result is a film that makes no attempt at any kind of nuanced political discussion. Nuance isn’t anywhere in the same neighborhood as Rambo: Last Blood. Instead we have an absolute Box Office bomb of a film that paints an ugly and nasty picture, making every Mexican person in the film out to be either a victim or a villain, with the only person the film treats with respect being the white guy at the center of it all. It’s a conservative power fantasy, Sly Stallone’s wet dream. The one thing it fails to do, though, is deliver anything like a proper Rambo film.

It’s been ten years since John Rabmo (Stallone, as always) moved back from Thailand to his father’s ranch in Arizona, having inherited the property when his father died. He’s spent that time raising horses and spending time with his old friend, Maria Beltran (Adriana Barraza), and her granddaughter, Gabriela (Yvette Monreal), who he’s raised like a daughter. Oh, and in his free time Rambo digs in his land, creating a complex network of tunnels, as if preparing for some war he fears will one day come.

Rambo ends up having to fight a war again, though, when Gabriela ends up kidnapped in Mexico. Gabriela had, for years, wanted to track down her absent father, who had abandoned her, and just ask why. Through her friend, Gizelle (Fenessa Pineda), Gabriela found out where her father was staying and had her confrontation, although it went very poorly. Ju\st wanting to go home, Gizelle instead convinced Gabriela to go to a club and relax… and almost immediately sells Gabriela out, letting her get caught and sold into the white slave trade. Now Rambo has to go into Mexico, find the cartel bosses that have her, and do what he does best: kill everyone that gets in his way.

The kindest reading of this film we can give is that Stallone wanted to bring attention to the horrors committed by Mexican cartels, as well as the white slave trade that is one of the pillars of their business. I am not an expert on Mexican politics, nor have I spent my days looking into the financial operations of Mexican cartels. I will accept the film’s idea that prostitution and white slavery is a way that Mexican thugs make money, and that it’s an ongoing issue, so on that subject, sure, I appreciate that the film wanted to try and bring light to the situation. Lesson for everyone: if you’re a young woman and you have business in a Mexican town, especially one that is known to be under the control of the cartels, perhaps don’t go in there alone. Maybe bring some friends with you as backup or, better you, don’t go there at all.

With that out of the way, everything about this film is stupid and/or cruelly written. For starters, Gabriela wants to meet her father and find out why he abandoned her. She knows where he is. She has his address. She could have simply called. It’s a city in Mexico, not an ashram in Tibet. They have phones in Mexico (hell, they probably have phones in ashrams in Tibet for that matter). All of this could have been easily resolved if the girl had first tried to call her former father and say, “hey, pops, what gives?” The conversation she has with him, in the movie, lasts only a few seconds before he rudely slams the door in her face, saying he didn’t ever care for her and he was happy to leave. That’s the kind of thing you can resolve in a phone call.

Bear in mind, Garbriela is supposed to be a smart girl. We’re told she’s top of her class in high school, with bright prospects for her future in college. While book smarts doesn’t always translate to street smarts, you would expect that someone this smart, like she is, would at least be able to think about calling someone before driving however many hours down to Mexico to confront some person in a, as we’re shown, dangerous city just for the sake of one-to-one face time. It’s not well thought out, and that’s because the film doesn’t actually care about Gabriela. It wants her in Mexico because she’s simply a prop to get Rambo moving.

Following on that, if we accept that Gabriela does have to go to Mexico to handle her business one-to-one in person, the film didn’t have to telegraph so clearly that everyone around her is a vile, evil person out to ruin her life and destroy her future. The film seems to think (based entirely on what’s on screen and the obvious subtext it’s providing) that every Mexican is either a villain or a victim, and usually a villain. Gabriela is sold out by her former friend, Gizelle, who has clearly joined a gang since moving to Mexico. Gabriela is rejected by her father in the cruelest way possible. Gabriela is immediately preyed upon by the cartel, drugs, kidnapped, sold, repeatedly raped, drugged again and, after Rambo tries and fails to save her the first time, tortured over and over. The film goes out of its way to abuse her and make her fate as dark as possible.

I’m not saying that cartels don’t have cruel people working in them, or that there isn’t darkness in the world. The film, though, seems to revel in this dark power fantasy, going far beyond any point it has to in telling its story. For starters, why does Gizelle have to be an evil gang member? She could have just been Gabriela’s friend, there to help her find her father and, when that went poorly, she might have wanted to help the girl take her mind off it. She could still take her out, take her to a place to have some fun, and then Gabriela could have been drugged and taken away when Gizelle wasn’t paying attention. Distracted, maybe drunk herself, but not actively cruel. It doesn’t make her into the best character, but it also doesn’t make her a complete asshole, either, like the film wants her to be.

To a similar degree, the film doesn’t have to have the cartel be as actively cruel to Gabriela specifically as they are in the film. Because Rambo comes looking for her the gang leaders, Hugo (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) and Victor (Óscar Jaenada) Martinez, decide to single her out, to make an example of her. But the question is, who is she an example for? The other girls in the film are already cowed, and they don’t have anyone looking for them. Meanwhile, anyone that would go looking for the girls likely wouldn’t know about Gabriela or the torture she’s suffering, nor would that me likely to dissuade anyone that just wants to save someone they love. All it does is add more needless cruelty into the film simply for the sake of it.

Finally (and spoilers ahead for the last acts of the film) there’s Gabriela’s ultimate fate. She goes through this whole ordeal, getting drugged, kidnapped, sold to a whore house, repeatedly raped, drugged repeatedly, and tortured, all so that, once she is finally saved by Rambo (on his second, more violent attempt) she dies in the car on the way back to the U.S. How does this, in any way, inform her character arc? It doesn’t. She’s a major character, one that the whole plot revolves around, but instead of somehow giving her any reason to move on from this whole ordeal (which, yes, would have taken years and years of therapy and, likely, she’d never completely heal) the film decides to shove her in a fridge so that Rambo can go out and being the angle of justice he’s supposed to be. Naturally this means luring the bad guys back to his compound so he can kill them in his tunnels, as expected.

But then, not even Rambo comes across well in this film. He’s the hero of the story, if we want to call him that, but this is barely the Rambo we remember from previous movies. That guy was savvy, skilled in the ways of stealth and war, a guerilla fighter who used the terrain to best the bad guys. Sometimes he got caught, but he always found a way to escape and complete his mission. This film turns him into an old man that can barely keep it together, who doesn’t use his skills to stop the bad guys, who can’t even complete his mission properly. While we can argue that old age comes for all of us, maybe that means that instead of having this old guy go into territory he doesn’t know, failing his mission twice in the process, we should have, instead, just not had this film at all. If you’re going to do a Rambo film, at least get the character right.

I can see a version of this film that touches upon all the political things it wants to touch upon. I can see one where it highlights what the cartels are doing in Mexican cities, where women are captured and sold into white slavery. I can see a version of this film where all of that comes to pass but without the over-the-top, needless cruelty. Gabriela goes to Mexico to meet with her friend, who then points her in the direction of her father. That meeting doesn’t go well, Gizelle tries to help, but her friend gets kidnapped. Worried, Gizella calls Maria, who then tells Rambo that Gabriela is missing in Mexico, and Rambo goes south to get her. He does so, using his particular set of skills effectively, getting Gabriela out and bringing her back to the U.S. In his final battle with the cartel (which, sure, we can do in his tunnels) she is at his side, fighting back and regaining some of her power in the process. She has an arc, and in the end she stands beside Rambo, victorious.

Is that a good movie? Maybe not, but it’s better than what we actually got. It has political ideas without painting everyone in Mexico with a broad, racist brush. It gives characters needed arcs, which they’re lacking in the current version of the film. And while it does eventually devolve into over-the-top action, just like the film we did get, it at least uses that action to further the arcs of the characters instead of simply using it twenty minutes of carnage that might make even Jigsaw go, “man, we could probably take it back at least half a step.”

The biggest sin that Rambo: Last Blood commits is that it loses what makes a Rambo film interesting to watch. Instead of a film that tries to mean something while still making its action hero into the world’s most amazing soldier, we have a sad, tried, needlessly cruel version of Taken instead. It’s not fun to watch, at all, and all it does is illustrate that Sylvester Stallone is more interested in pushing MAGA talking points about the evils of Mexicans than he is in actually telling a compelling narrative about his long-running character. The end of John Rambo showed the hero walking home after his decades long journey. His travels should have ended there.