RAMBO: LAST BLOOD

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND OUCH, THAT'S GOT TO HURT

Well, it's better than the previous one in the increasingly mis-numbered series: this is actually the fifth in the series after the film that should have been, but wasn't, called Rambo IV. That fourth entry was a senseless and unengaging bloodbath that was surprisingly dull for a film with a body count of 254 (according to the Rambo Wiki site) which tried to justify its insane levels of wanton carnage with a spurious political subtext about Burma. Happily the new one doesn't even attempt any kind of commentary but just settles for being a meatheaded sub-Chuck Norris revenge movie, and it's (relatively) better for it.

Having done Vietnam, rural America, Vietnam again, Afghanistan and Burma, John Rambo is now home on his ranch, training horses and sitting on his porch watching the sun go down. He has an undefined relationship with a woman who lives there, except that at one point he knew her grand-daughter's father before he abandoned the family and disappeared into Mexico. Said grand-daughter decides to contact her absentee father, against Rambo's advice, but is promptly abducted by a sex slave ring; when she doesn't come back, Rambo heads down there to sort things out and kill people...

Sylvester Stallone is now 73 years old (Roger Moore stopped being James Bond when he was 58) so this is probably Rambo's final outing. It plays early on with his being damaged, mentally, emotionally and physically by his war experiences, suggesting he's susceptible to flashing lights and loud noises (though he does have a long scene in a strobe-lit nightclub); despite the horrors of Nam he's built a vast network of tunnels under his ranch which come in handy for the Skyfall-like finale of bloody booby traps and absurdly huge explosions.

Rambo: Last Blood is a popcorn meat movie and a solidly mounted example of the type, but nothing deeper than that: it isn't very good at all, it has very little in the way of humour (though some of the violence is very funny in its over-the-top sadism) and Brian Tyler's unmemorable score isn't in the same league as Jerry Goldsmith's music for the first three films, to which it pays insufficient homage. But if you want half an hour of anonymous Mexican scumbags getting slaughtered bloodily enough to earn the coveted red 18 certificate then it's probably worth plodding through the first hour of backstory and setup to get there. I enjoyed it more than I was expecting, and I had more fun than I was probably supposed to, but I couldn't honestly recommend it to anyone who wouldn't go and see it anyway.

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