I need to go to a Family Video at some point to check out what it costs to rent a DVD. $3.99 being a special rental rate for a movie on iTunes seems a bit high. It is especially high when you take into consideration that iTunes has a $4.99 for purchase section.
Yes, you can buy $4.99 DVDs and Blu-Rays at a video store, but those titles are far from new. A skip or two in "Suicide Girls Must Die" did not affect that film too much (as I predicted), but the stakes should be higher for "Rambo: Last Blood". On sale for $9.99 for a week (I would not be surprised if longer.), I thought purchasing it to ensure quality was a worthwhile gamble.
It has been 10 years since John Rambo had returned to the United States from Thailand, and the ranching life seems to suit him. He is now medicated, but old habits are hard to kick as he maintains a tunnel network under the family home. If anything, his paranoia allows him to be the perfect uncle to the orphaned Gabrielle who he has groomed into an equestrian ace and a scholar.
Despite having a loving family, Gabrielle cannot shake the feeling of being unwanted. This leads her to keep in contact with her delinquent friend Gizelle in Mexico. Her hopes are that her friend maybe able to locate the father who abandoned her. Gizelle succeeds and Gabrielle heads to confront him. Of course Rambo's niece does not know that Gizelle survives by working for a human trafficking's ring. When she does not return, Rambo throws his meds away and crosses the border with bringing along a hammer and a handgun.
Will the arms Rambo brought be enough to take her back? If you are the kingpins who took her, you better hope it is. He is only trying to be a hero. If anything happens to his family, you will be the target of his wrath.
Rambo is one of the first action heroes I was aware of. Or I should say, he seemed to work the most. Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones and Han Solo played a greater part in my development, but Sylvester Stallone seemed to relish playing this role more. My first true action movie going experience was "007: The Living Daylights", but when you grow up around kids whose parents did not care what they put into the VCR, you heard from everyone else how badass Rambo was. Sorry David Morrell, but this is the Rambo I gravitated to.
I have never actually watched "First Blood" from beginning to end. Rambo not trying to kill a small town (Directly at least, fuck their economy.) meant he was a really deep character, and his speech at the end of the film told me there was an important message behind the film. It was not until my teens that I saw any of the films, and frankly, the first film felt above my comprehension (Teens do include 11, right?). When you throw this guy back into Vietnam or land him in Afghanistan to win a war, that was easy for me to understand. No unnecessary drama, just action and a sense of a man trying to find redemption is what I watched these films for. As I grew to love ridiculous effects, the more gore an installment had, the better it was.
"Rambo: Last Blood" was not as much as a hit when compared to the fourth installment. This left me wondering if it was just a bad movie. After comparing the Rotten Tomatoes scores and not seeing much of a difference, I determined this film deserves a chance to be viewed. This just shows that we need an action movie equivalent to the Tomatoes scale to better serve us fans of gratuitous violence. Too bad "Bloody Elbows" was already taken.
"Last Blood" is a revenge film, but it makes the mistake of having the instigating issue occur until the 45-minute mark. This is not the film I was hoping for. I was not interested in Stallone replacing Neeson in terms of using their particular set of skills. Because Sylvester Stallone wants to show that Rambo is finally civilized, he does not use his special traits when he comes to the rescue. The results only further humanize him, and that is not want I want from this legend.
Also, the action is reserved for the last 15 minutes of the film. Once Rambo finally kills/brutalizes someone in the bastardized predecessors (two through four), the action feels constant. The screenplay allows us to thoroughly enjoy the climax because we want his vengeance to be obtained, but it is not the journey we wanted to take to get there. Being a member of "The Last Jedi" is, at worst, the third best "Star Wars" film camp, I appreciate that Stallone and Matthew Cirulnic tried something new with the formula by attempting to rip our hearts out emotionally, but the past formula cannot be abandoned.
A part from the story missteps, the film suffers from having few opportunities for director Adrian Grunberg to shine. Perhaps he did not have the ability to shine, but I enjoyed his previous theatrical release, "Get the Gringo", so I know he was not talentless. Again, the finale is great, but with everything beyond the Rambo Ranch scenes being shot at night with no environmental effects (rain, dust, etc.), it just feels cheap. There are some scenes that could work in Grindhouse features, but he is making a "Rambo" movie, not a "Machete" sequel, so the efforts are lost on the typical filmgoer.
To get to the goretastic finale, you must love the character of Rambo to enjoy "Last Blood". I fall into that category, but I could see a lot of people being bored with this flick and skip to the literal heart-wrenching conclusion. If only we still had FlixMix ("Boogeymen: The Killer Compilation" and "Ultimate Fights") around to remedy this situation. Could you imagine a compilation film composed of the best scenes from films that might not be worth your time? Now "That's Entertainment."
