The BFD Movie Review – Rambo: Last Blood – Oh the Joys of Bloody Revenge

How does a man well past his party years wind up in a cinema early on a Friday evening drinking whiskey neat and watching the latest Rambo movie?

A bad week, that’s how. A vicious stew of happenstance – a wallet raping root canal, a work week from Hell and a birthday reminder of the inevitability of senescence and death. A hipflask-accompanied action movie seemed in order.

Rambo: Last blood is not a good movie. But If you’ve read any of the mainstream reviews you will have been told that not only is it not a good movie, it is a very, very bad movie. Not qualitatively bad, morally bad. Sly Stallone stands accused not of any cinematic sins (of which he has committed many, ‘Stop or My Mom Will Shoot’ anyone?) but of xenophobia, racism and worst of all ‘toxic masculinity’.

The film begins with John Rambo in retirement on his Arizona ranch, providing a home for his old family friend Maria and her granddaughter, Gabrielle. After an ill-advised trip to Mexico to look up her dead-beat dad, Gabrielle falls into the hands of some bad hombres – Mexican sex-traffickers.

Rambo…well you can guess the rest can’t you? It’s a revenge flick and like all revenge flicks it follows the formula – terrible injustice followed by preparation for vengeance followed by wreaking of vengeance. It ain’t clever or sophisticated but boy is it emotionally satisfying. Especially to the drunk guy in aisle G picturing his boss as the guy Rambo gives impromptu heart surgery to with his bare hands. Needless to say, the climax played out in Rambo’s home-made tunnel system (he learnt plenty from the Viet-Cong) complete with surround sound stereo system pumping out the Doors ‘5 to 1’ is exhilaratingly violent.

The charges of xenophobia and racism have targeted the portrayal of Mexicans in the film. Yes, as in virtually every Hollywood movie the villains are stereotypes. Were Star Wars’ Stormtroopers or the Nazis in Indiana Jones accorded any individuality? This is comic book stuff, the line between good and evil needs to be drawn as forcefully and crudely as Rambo draws his compound bow at the end of the film. And it’s not as if Stallone (who co-wrote) is conjuring Mexican sex traffickers up from some depraved imagination, these evil mofos are all too real.

The charge of racism might hold a teaspoon of water if Rambo’s best friend and the girl who he risks his life to rescue weren’t also Mexican. Now why are critics forgetting to mention this pertinent fact? It’s almost as if they want to find racism in the movie. 

What has got liberal critics’ free-trade 100% hemp panties even more in a twist, is Rambo’s staunch masculinity. 

Always a tragic figure of PTSD and the toll America’s wars take on the men who serve, in Last Blood, Rambo finds purpose in protecting a young woman. As her de-facto uncle he attempts to protect her ‘innocence’, a word he repeats twice, which given his usual mono-syllabic utterances, carries some weight. The Guardian reviewer, displaying that paper’s usual disconnect from reality finds this objectionable, suggesting a 16 year old girl should take her own revenge against a cartel of tooled up gangsters. As per current political fashions, any depiction of a man playing the traditional male role of protector and defending women gets a well-manicured thumbs down from the critics, while out in the real world amongst people ignorant of gender theory it gets two blistered thumbs up (It has an 85% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes – to a critics’ 30%).

The critics seem to be treating this movie like the retarded kid in school – easy meat for playground bullying. Stallone may talk like he took a baseball bat to the cranium in early life, but he’s no fool (my favourite quote of his is: ‘I built my body to carry my brain around’. Well, I didn’t say he was modest.)

And he knows something these critics don’t.

The whole revenge genre, arguably beginning with Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in 1971 and continuing with Dirty Harry, the Death Wish movies, and latterly the Taken series are a public good. Much like heavy metal and contact sports they provide a harmless release for the aggression and frustration most men (and more than a few women) feel in a society that is more and more intolerant of our baser instincts. Absent some serious genetic reprogramming, these instincts aren’t going anywhere, and all the kumbayaing and moral lecturing from on high ain’t gonna change that. 

In the movie Rambo tells the 16 year old Gabrielle that he knows ‘how black a man’s heart can be’ and when she idealistically claims that people can change like he has, he replies that he hasn’t, he has just learnt to ‘keep a lid on it’.

In accepting this truth about the human soul, and the need for the ‘lid’ to be lifted a little from time to time, ‘dumb’ revenge movies like Rambo: Last Blood are not half as dumb as those Panglossian Pollyannas who deny it altogether.