Rambo must confront his past and unearth his ruthless combat skills to exact revenge in a final mission.
At the end of 2008’s “Rambo,” our protagonist, John Rambo, finally moves back to Bowie, Arizona to be with his dad. As “Rambo: Last Blood” begins, eleven years have passed since the events in “Rambo” and his father has now passed away but Rambo is living on the horse ranch and takes care of the place with his old friend Maria Beltran (Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). Having never had a family of his own, he takes care of Maria and becomes a father-figure for Gabrielle. As time goes by, Gabrielle becomes obsessed with locating her real father, Miguel (Rick Zingale), who abandoned her when she was a child and forced her and her mother to move to the United States for a better life. She informs Rambo of her intentions but he tries to dissuade her by telling her that her father is not a good man and not worth chasing after. She wants to know why he left her and her mother and one night after telling her grandmother and Rambo that she is going to a friend’s house for the night, she secretly makes her way to Mexico to meet up with an old friend, Gizelle (Fenessa Pineda), who says she found her father’s location.
When Gabrielle fails to turn up the next day, Rambo knows exactly where she has gone. He follows in her footsteps and locates Gizelle whom he forces to tell what happened to Gabrielle. She states Gabrielle visited her father who proceeded to tell her that he never cared for her or her mother and upset, Gizelle recommended they go out partying. While at a local nightclub, she was kidnapped by a drug cartel, run by brothers Hugo and Victor Martinez (Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Óscar Jaenada), who are known to take young women and force them into prostitution. Rambo makes his way to the nightclub and corners El Flaco (Pascacio López), the man who was responsible for Gabrielle’s disappearance. While there, a local journalist, Carmen Delgado (Paz Vega), is working on an exposé of the drug cartel and when Rambo and El Flaco leave, she follows them. El Flaco tells Rambo where the cartel compound is and when he tries to sneak in, he is discovered and almost beaten to death by the cartel and left for dead on the streets. Carmen brings Rambo back to her home and nurses him back to health. When he finally recovers, she tells him who she is and that a few years earlier, her younger sister had been kidnapped and eventually murdered by the cartel. With her help, Rambo is able to locate the brothel where Gabrielle is and rescues her but on their way back to the US, she succumbs to the physical torture she has endured and also a forced overdose.
Rambo takes her body back to their ranch where he buries her, the only ray of hope he had ever known and Maria packs up her stuff and leaves to stay with her sister, knowing that Rambo is going to stop at nothing to take down the cartel. He makes his way back into Mexico and kills Victor and some of his men, leaving a calling card for Victor’s brother Hugo. He makes his way back to his ranch where he proceeds to rig the entire place with explosive and deadly booby traps and waits patiently for Hugo and his remaining men, whereby he proceeds to decimate each and every one of them until only Hugo remains!
“Rambo: Last Blood” received a lot of negative reviews upon its initial release, many pointing out the excessive use of bloody violence and gore but this is the cartel we are talking about and granted, in real life, one man would not be able to take down an entire cartel but this is movie fiction, so who better to stop them than John Rambo? I enjoyed this film and it is a fitting conclusion to the franchise which started back in 1982 with “First Blood,” the first and best of the entire series. For a sprightly 73-year-old, Stallone is still in amazing condition and he pulls off all the action scenes and fight choreography splendidly. Naturally, the ending is left wide open for a possible follow-up but I think it’s time for Rambo to put down his Compound Bow and sail off into the sunset. While I’m sure Stallone would be more than capable of pulling off another outing, we can only suspend disbelief for so long before he becomes a geriatric joke. For many, “Rambo: Last Blood” was an unnecessary entry in the long-running series but if you can stomach the gore, I’d recommend it as Rambo’s last outing, and what a good one it is too.
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