12/5/19 - Rambo: Last Blood (2019) - 3-/10

If I wanted to see a Taken film, I would have. This is pretty slow and it is mostly a set up for an old bat to be whacked upon some fools, but if you want some gruesome retaliatory kills, then the last 15 minutes is totally your bag…if you can survive till then. 

The biggest stick I heard this film getting was its Red Hat/MAGA-ness. I didn’t find it to be so deafeningly narrowed in its aim as I expected. Yes, there are Mexican antagonists and they do very bad things, but the film is also probably 40% in Spanish, with main characters being some level of immigrant and perfectly reasonable & relatable. Would it be nice if there were better depictions? Yes, but this didn’t feel like an intrinsic politically motivated portrayal but mostly just a lackadaisical generic villainy portrayal (same as if they were Eastern European, Middle Eastern, Southern, etc.) - lazy and stereotypical. But there are plenty of other depictions within this film which barely equate to human emotion or interaction, so I am not going to praise it in the slightest. It just wasn’t as horrible as I anticipated as far as overtly more racist than other racist depictions.

The horrors visited upon our female co-star are visceral and unseemly, but at least they felt more akin to actual behavior patterns than some more tidy action fare (Taken being a great example). It is rough and gratuitous, but makes some sense.

Perhaps the biggest flaw with this film, in my humble opinion, is it lacks action. There is next to nothing until the last 15 minutes. Now, at that point, it is a total bloodbath, but you can’t be so nigh-on boring before you get to that point. I think this is probably the worst of the Rambo franchise. If you are wondering whether to skip or not, let John Rambo’s memory live in Vietnam (or Afghanistan, or even Burma).