For someone who grew up in the 1980s, the word “Rambo” works like a password to a portal into other dimensions. There wasn’t a day that the kids in the neighborhood or at school didn’t get together to play something that mentioned, even indirectly, the character of the muscular antihero Sylvester Stallone. This even included supporting characters who went unnoticed by adults and were always very concerned about boring details like the plot and subliminal messages that were a lot discussed at the time. They certainly didn’t remember the lovable Colonel Samuel Trautman, who was very popular with children. Details like these were the fun of the younger ones, who took the opportunity to eventually impersonate the protagonist. To take a break from the hustle and bustle of the water balloon bombings and styrofoam knife fights we were given our Rambo figures and of course Colonel Trautman complete with helicopter and all. Rambo was everything an ’80s boy wanted to be.
As the years went by and we grew up, so did John Rambo. No longer just a nearly anonymous veteran of the Vietnam War (19551975), the completely clumsy guerrilla fighter from “Rambo Programmed to Kill” (1982), the first film in the series directed by Ted Kotcheff, is taking on increasingly emotional contours over time more robust. Captured and tortured by police officers, a plot very similar to that of George P. Cosmatos’ (19412005) Rambo 2: The Mission (1985) and depicting the character’s imprisonment in a federal prison, leaves Rambo the green beret and takes on the red band on the forehead, which has long been its trademark. He travels to Afghanistan, of course, to rescue Colonel Trautman, who has been taken hostage by the Russians. With a little exaggeration, what one sees in Peter MacDonald’s “Rambo 3” (1988) gives an idea, albeit a faint one, of the escalating conflicts between the United States and the countries of Central Asia. Two decades later, in “Rambo IV” (2008), financed by Stallone himself, the title character is in Thailand living modestly on what she can catch and the venomous snakes she catches to sell until her peace after a group of people is shaken Missionaries who are transporting medicine and food to a local tribe are kidnapped by the army of Burma, now Myanmar. Filled with guilt for driving her from one country to another, Rambo takes up arms again to save her.
Adrian Grunberg’s “Rambo: Until the End” functions, with the idiom’s permission, as a nonconsecutive sequence of the misadventures of Stallone’s exmilitary. In common with all the other productions in the franchise, John Rambo’s starting point is humanitarian, although his new configuration bears no resemblance to the four previous films. In the 2019 feature film, Rambo once again relives moments of calm before the storm turns into his life. The warweary exsoldier enjoys moments of relative peace of mind and manages posttraumatic stress with a slew of pills, but knows that the murderous rage that has been simmering inside him until recently only needs a good reason to spring back into action. This reason ties directly to his niece Gabrielle (played by Yvette Monreal), who was raised by him and his sisterinlaw Maria (played by Adriana Barraza, his late wife’s sister). Rambo spends his free time tending to his horses on a ranch in Arizona, Southwest USA, while contemplating the vastness of the plain from his porch rocking chair. When Gabrielle embarks against his will on a suicidal journey to find her father, Miguel, the character of Marco De La O, in Mexico, who abandoned her ten years earlier, Rambo falls back into the ninth circle of hell. Her enemies are now Victor and Hugo Martinez, played by Oscar Jaenada and Sergio PerisMencheta respectively, drug dealers and women who hold the girl captive.
As expected, Rambo sets out to rescue his niece, but is defeated and narrowly escapes death. He survives, aided by journalist Carmen Delgado, in a cameo that is both brief and emotional by Paz Vega, whose sister was brutally murdered by the Martinezes. The protagonist manages to free Gabrielle, but in an interesting twist in Stallone’s screenplay, cowritten by Dan Gordon and Matthew Cirulnick, this isn’t the possible happy ending to the story, but the beginning of Rambo’s revenge saga, the Vigilante from deep America, forgotten by official America. This final segment of Rambo: Last Blood is very reminiscent of one of the main subplots of Martin Scorsese’s contemporary classic, Taxi Driver (1976), balancing all of the film’s previous clichés, and something tells me the now that Rambo is here With nothing left to lose, he can return to the beginning, still full of energy and plenty of bullets to engage in one of the myriad wars raging around the world. May Hollywood screenwriters read this article before it’s too late.
Movie: Rambo: Last blood
Direction: Adrian Grunberg
Year: 2019
Genres: Action/Western
Note: 9/10