Rambo: Do Not Resuscitate

Spoilers for a newly released movie. 

Oh look, a new movie release that got me riled up enough to start writing again. Briefly. Was I meant to do a summary piece for the cosmic horror series? I think I was. Maybe if my interest holds long enough I’ll remember to do that. Alternatively, I might go review something else. Who knows?

Why am I going on about this? Well, it’s because much like Rambo: Last Blood, I haven’t really got enough content to fill a full review here. I walked into the cinema at 7pm. I walked out at 8:50pm. That included 20 minutes of previews and ads, and hanging around 4 minutes into the credits to see if the extended tribute sequence would clarify if Rambo survived the movie. So we’re barely hitting a 90 minute movie. Which isn’t a bad thing normally, but this movie was just so empty, so devoid of purpose all I could think about for roughly 80 of those minutes was Agent Smith doing his whole “without purpose, we are nothing” spiel.

I’m getting off topic again. Ok, what was this shit about again? Rambo lives in Arizona now, has since the end of Rambo (2008). Looks like he’s been living with an old Mexican lady and her niece. Niece is typically young and innocent, has a bright future…except she’s a plot device in a Stallone-based cruelty film, so she’s toast. She went back to Mexico on her own to find her absent father, who never wanted her. Immediately after that she gets kidnapped by a cartel and forced into sex work. Mercifully (?), this only lasts a few days before Rambo gets her out, but she dies as a result of the massive amount of heroin being forced into her.

Getting to this point, and the point where Rambo kills one of the Cartel brothers to provoke the other into coming after him, takes up something like 60ish minutes of the runtime. In that time the above is basically all that happens. Rambo is beaten up by the villain brothers, who leave him alive because it would have been an even shorter movie otherwise. He gets saved by a journalist whose only purpose is to heal Rambo, then point him at the brother he kills to provoke the end sequence. Then we get the end sequence. Roll credits.

See how there’s not a lot going on there? The last 20 or so minutes is a single extended fight scene in the tunnels Rambo dug under his property. Before going in, I thought this movie was probably going to be a shitty attempt at copying Logan. Instead it’s 90% Death Wish, 5% Home Alone, 5% Saw, 100% pointless. The few characters in this film are so underwritten they’re blatantly just there to move the plot along – the journo mentioned above does exactly those two things and is never seen again. Cut out some of the wasted expository dialogue and scenery shots, and this could have been a 60 minute film.

Oh yes, almost forgot. The film also fails at being an action film. The only action sequence in it is the third act throwdown, and it’s ok. Not bad, but there’s nothing memorable going on, and it really only serves to frame just how little was going on in the rest of the film. It’s perfectly weighted and timed to remind you that you’ve sat through an unknown amount of time (turned out to be about 65ish minutes) of nothing but characters lacking character just doing their bit to point the plot to the fight.

To wrap things up, that end credit sequence? Implies that the wounded Rambo has fucked off to the mountains to become a sort of grumpier Jason Voorhees. Which was just infuriating, because if he’d died on his damned rocking chair I could have lined up all sorts of jokes about how Rambo, like the franchise, had finally died a tepid death that probably should have come in Vietnam. Don’t even bother with this one on DVD unless you already have the other four and are really, really, keen on just having the entire franchise on your shelf.