Who is John Rambo? In David Morrell’s original novel “First Blood,” and Ted Koetcheff’s film adaptation, John was a tragically young veteran of the Vietnam War. Cast out service and head-long into the moral conflict of the hearts and minds of people on the homefront. The psychological scars of war had made home and John unrecognisable to one another. After being vilified by a gang of ugly small-town cops flexing their inadequacy, he’s triggered and reflexively goes rogue, disarming and debilitating a wholly inadequate militia. One man’s guerilla war for respect.

The conclusion of the book ends with the death of the protagonist. The conclusion of the film, obviously as we wouldn’t be now talking about the fifth damned Rambo movie, ends with Sylvester Stallone’s wounded roar. American might and military excellence cast aside as a result of the conflict’s moral quagmire. What followed in the following decades are a series sporadic sequels defined by over ‘Remasculinisation’ and sadomasochistic revenge “gore porn” denying the moral crises of imperialism.

Cut to, “Rambo: Last Blood”. Refreshingly this ‘last of’ tale takes a once outmoded soldier and has him adorn the costume of another old American hero trope, a cowboy. John Rambo, a retired soldier and plodding rancher, lives for his adopted family of Mexican migrants on the Tex-Mex border. He’s making a modest living, exercising his demons with a mixture of meds and bunker building. When his surrogate daughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal) ventures into Mexico proper to confront her long-absent father, she’s abducted by a family sex-trafficking cartel lead by Victor (Óscar Jaenada) and Hugo Martínez (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) and enslaved. Rambo, as we know, has a particular set of skills, machetes and bows with exploding arrow tips.

Rambo: Last Blood establishes a refreshing throwback take on the character that draws a more direct line between the shell-shocked soldier of the original film, rather than sculpted one-man army. Screenwriters Stallone and Matthew Cirulnick go with the “less is so much more” route for Stallone. Stallone’s performance is one of toil, squashing internal turmoil - conveying the external symptoms of decades of death. The clunky family scenes, ultimately aim for blissfully unaware family life. He’s a vault which hasn’t ever revealed the depths of his past deeds.

From the moment of the abduction, director Adrian Grunberg makes Mexico a haven for the most heinously amoral villains - Cartels - that the world has ever seen. Where “First Blood: Part II” (great title) initiated Rambo’s Vietnam Revenge, the crossing of the border in Rambo: Last Blood triggers the ongoing propagation of Trumpian fear-mongering.

Gabrielle (Monreal) is immediately sold out by greedy friends who sell her into sexual servitude. A biological parent who - to your face - admits to leaving because they don’t like you. Police bribed into overlooking the operation with your flesh. Sophisticated systems of pharmaceutical control to deaden slaves wits and physical torture.

It’s a hostile warzone, without the clarity of outlining the conflict. If you’ve ever done any manual labour on a hot day you’ve had sweat attract dirt and grime towards your glistening body. When you’re done, you feel dirty. The sequence goes to great lengths to underscore the inhumanity. The filmmakers are hoping that the means can justify the end of the film. It doesn’t; you feel soiled and complicit to a perverse actualisation of an evil vision. I never thought I could write this, but even “The Counselor” had more restraint.

Rambo liberates his ward, in vain. He’s left with a few more scars for his trouble. His actions lure the cartel across the border and into an underground maze of death and mutilation.

Blending (literally) gritty underground torture bunkers of “Wolf Creek”, trap ingenuity of “Home Alone” and cringe-worthy mutilation of “Saw”; results in an unexpected climax. It is hilarious. It’s one of the most riotously hilarious endings to almost any movie I’ve seen this year.

“Rambo: Last Blood” has the earnestness of a eulogy, and it lands like the most inappropriately hilarious roast. With every new outlandish death, laughter turned to cackling, turned to face hurting and tears. It almost registered the same sense of joy that the cowboys/Busby Berkeley musical brawl did at the end of Blazing Saddles. It’s only when you’re composing yourself as you exit this vigilante propaganda that you realise, the sacrifice of the Vietnam War didn’t course-correct American colonial pursuits and motivations, it made heroes out of those who denied its lessons. You may find yourself muttering “the horror, the horror of it all.”

★/★★★★

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