Adrian Grunberg's 2019 film opens with Rambo on horseback in a storm, riding hard to rescue a hiker trapped in a flash flood. It is a quietly effective image: a man of extraordinary capability using his skills to save rather than destroy. The film that follows does not sustain that promise.
At a Glance
Director: Adrian Grunberg
Runtime: 89 minutes
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Yvette Monreal
Release: 2019
Critics Rating: ★½ (1.5/5 stars, mean-spirited and thin)
Audience Rating: ★★½ (2.5/5 stars, divisive)
Plot
Rambo, now living on his family's Arizona ranch and caring for his housekeeper's granddaughter Gabrielle, travels to Mexico when Gabrielle is kidnapped by a cartel and sold into sex trafficking. When he finds her, she dies from the drugs she has been given, and Rambo returns to his ranch to prepare for the cartel's inevitable retaliation. The problem is structural: Gabrielle dies before the film has done enough work with her to make her loss land as grief rather than as plot mechanism. The revenge premise that follows is the series' most generic, a framework that exists to justify the ranch siege rather than to say anything about the character it is supposedly concluding.
Characters
Stallone plays Rambo's domesticity and grief with a conviction that makes the quieter passages work. His relationship with Gabrielle is warm and specific in the first act, and the film is at its best when it stays close to that. Paz Vega's Carmen is a journalist of intelligence and moral seriousness whose presence gives the film its most credible secondary thread. Sergio Peris-Mencheta's Martinez brothers are antagonists of adequate menace and no psychological depth, villains whose function is to arrive at the ranch and be killed. The ranch siege is staged with tactical precision and considerable brutality, and it is the film's strongest sequence by a significant margin.
Meaning / Themes
The film wants to be about the completion of Rambo's journey, a final reckoning with his own capacity for violence. That is a worthwhile idea. The problem is that the revenge premise is too thin to carry it. Gabrielle's death is supposed to be the wound that makes the violence feel necessary rather than recreational, but the script has not given her enough life for her absence to do that work. The film raises the question of what Rambo is and what he is for, and then answers it with a booby-trapped tunnel system rather than with anything the series has earned.
Direction
Grunberg's direction is competent and uninspired. The first act, in which Rambo's domestic life is established, is handled with enough care to make the subsequent violence feel personal rather than arbitrary. The ranch siege is the film's directorial high point: brutal, tactically precise, and staged with a clarity that makes Rambo's capability legible without turning it into spectacle. Outside of that sequence, the film moves through its locations without building atmosphere or tension. Brian Tyler's score is spare and understated, which suits the grimmer register. Last Blood received a largely negative critical response on release, with most reviewers identifying the superficiality and mean-spirited tone as its central problems. It is now most frequently discussed as the weakest entry in the series, notable for the closing siege and Stallone's work in the quieter passages.
Final Verdict: Last Blood is a thin and mean-spirited conclusion that gives Rambo a farewell of considerable violence and almost no earned weight. The ranch siege is the series' most tactically precise action sequence, Stallone's performance in the first act is the film's genuine achievement, and Carmen gives the picture a thread of moral seriousness it otherwise lacks. But the failure to develop Gabrielle and the superficiality of the revenge premise make this the series' most disappointing film. It wanted to give Rambo a final reckoning. It did not have the script to make that reckoning feel true.