Things got a bit…bleak for Rambo once the towers fell.
This is Part 3 of a 3 part series looking back at the Rambo films, as it shifted from a somber tale of the broken American spirit, to an era of bombastic American Exceptionalism Propaganda, to out-and-out post GWOT horror show, all while reviewing the newest 4K boxset from Lionsgate!
This week we focus on Rambo as he spirals into complete violent chaos, becoming a specter of hate and carnage in the wake of post-9/11 US foreign policy with Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood.
After Rambo saved America’s confidence in the 1980s, he sat out the ‘90s. In many ways, it makes sense; the fall of the USSR removed the boogeyman that Rambo had fought both indirectly and directly in the sequel films; the culture had shifted away from the “rah rah” jingoism of the Reagan years, the focus coming back to more domestic issues (enemy within); action films had also shifted, going from the muscle men of the ‘80s to more “average joe thrown in over his head” action of the ‘90s.
In the grand scheme of things, there really just wasn’t anyone for Rambo to fight in the ‘90s, and no one was really hankering to see him fight anyone, either.
Then, Hollywood, like the rest of the country, changed dramatically after September 11th. The enemy was once again very much out there, and we needed to take the battle to them! Cinema as a whole shifted from the doldrum of modern life (think American Beauty and Fight Club) towards power fantasies. Superheroes began their ascent towards box office domination with the X-Men Series and Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and our classic action series became about highly efficient spies that got the job done no matter what (The Bourne series and the Craig era of Bond).
What didn’t return was the jingoism of the ‘80s. Far from it, we as a country found ourselves not only shell shocked from the grand horror of the Towers falling, but of the immediate and incredibly violent reaction America had, with both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasion. This revulsion showed itself most prominently in our media through horror films. Horror shifted from a lighter, more comedic tone in the ‘90s to a bitter, violent, nihilistic outlook in the aughts. Hostel, Saw, The Texas Chainsaw remake, The Hills Have Eyes remake; the horror of the 2000’s was intensely brutal, intensely mean, and intensely angry.
Which brings us to 2008, and the release of Rambo. Rambo is unlike anything that came before it. It is not a somber drama like First Blood, or a goofy action film like First Blood Part 2 or Rambo III.
Rambo is a horror film.
Taking the director reins for the first time in the series, Sylvester Stallone transforms Rambo into something similar to what he was in First Blood; a broken, tired man who is just trying to exist, nothing more. He is a man who has violence in his heart, but he fights against the bubbling rage as best he can. But, after a group of missionaries are taken hostage in Burma, he is once again called back into action to become the Rambo he once was.
This Rambo is not the same that we remember. Sure, he’s still good at dispatching nameless goons while rocking a sweet blowout, but this time, Stallone plays him more like a Golem; a deity of wrath who only knows and understands violence. His already limited vocabulary has been parsed down to grunts and growls, his body transformed into a hulking, bulbous mass of scars and sinewy muscle. He stares with hatred in his eyes, like a feral violent beast, just looking for something else to kill. The Rambo of First Blood Part II took 30 seconds and a glamour pose to blow up a guy with an exploding arrow, and the Rambo if Rambo III was making jokes with Troutman as he ran through the desert shirtless. Rambo of Rambo disembowels a pedophile while staring him in the eyes.
But, it’s not to say that Rambo’s violence isn’t a bit justified. The enemy Rambo comes up against, the fascist army of the Burmese dictatorship, is one of the most cruel armies ever put to film. We open the film with a squadron forcing prisoners to run a lap through a minefield at gunpoint, before opening fire on them. And, boy howdy, that is the least offensive thing they do! The village assault that kicks off the 2nd act is one of the meanest sequences put to film; children are shot dead in the streets, a woman is raped by a cadre of soldiers, a baby is paraded around on a bayonet. There is really no preparing for how viciously cruel this sequence is. Nearly 20 years on, and it is still quite shocking.
But this is the world of Rambo; a world that is both reactive to the broader violence of the world, as well as the violence the US perpetrates. The Burmese army is brutal, animalistic, and uncompromising in their cruelty (Rambo also makes sure to make the head commander a pedophile as well, cause we’re just piling everything on at this point). They kill all, and any prisoners they take are either to refill their ranks or use as sadistic play things. It is a portrait of the outside world that is bleak and harrowing, an outside world that the “missionaries” (aka the audience surrogate) are wholly unprepared for. Their platitudes about “the sanctity of life” are worthless in the “real” world, and they pay for their naivete in blood.
Rambo also understands the sheer horror of the “shock and awe” approach to American foreign policy. Rambo is not a heroic figure here, but a movie monster, something akin to Jason Voorhees. He comes down on the Burmese army like a plague, killing anything that stands in his way in the most brutal way possible. When Rambo dispatches a would-be rapist, it isn’t a moment of heroism. It is shot against a swinging light, illuminating Rambo only enough to show the bulge of his forearms, the blood running down his fingers, and the hate in his eyes. It is a slow, silent death, as a traumatized missionary watching the violence unfold. This is the world, Rambo says; violent, and the only way to fight it is to be more violent.
The film shifts more into a classical 3rd act of action, which, admittedly, is pretty fucking great action. You’ve got Rambo turning dudes into paste with a .50 cal, the Burmese rebels blowing up the hillside with mortars, and flame throwers blasting everywhere. It’s awesome! It still makes sure to sneak in some symbolism, specifically the missionary leader, the most pious of them all, forced to kill a man (with a rock; like Cain & Abel!), learning about the true nature of man through bloody retribution. And, in the end, when the Burmese rebels come out victorious, Rambo once again disappears into the jungle, an elemental god of war receding back into the depths until he is needed once more.
And he is! Technically! Even if it 100% does not feel like a Rambo film! Rambo: Last Blood. Let’s just get through this one, everybody…
Last Blood is a bit of a headscratcher. Released over a decade after Rambo, it ostensibly takes place in the same universe, albeit with a Rambo who has grown and changed over the last decade; he has a kinda/sorta family (with just enough connection to them to make their suffering bad but not unbearable for the viewer; more on that in a bit), has built out his family’s farm, is able to interact normally in public, and he even went and cut his hair!
This is to say that; this doesn’t seem like Rambo. Everything about the character is essentially gone, be it the original emotionally wounded drifter, to the ripped propaganda machine, to the swollen death dealer. None of those traits are present; the Rambo of Last Blood is Rambo in name only.
Which carries into the story as well. Instead of fighting some sort of insurgency or surviving off of his own skills in some god forsaken land, here Rambo is on the search for his missing “daughter” through Mexico. Instead of the highly trained man of action, Rambo kinda just stumbles his way into multiple incredibly dangerous situations, with his ineptitude leading to tragedy, which then leads into a flurry of vengeance killings.
The usual comparison people make here is Rambo being in a Taken film, but I think the closer 1:1 is this being a stealth Death Wish sequel. Rambo is framed more as a simple man pushed to his limits, rather than the fine tuned killing machine we know him as. When his “daughter” goes missing, Rambo is thrown into a violent world he doesn’t seem to understand (even though he keeps assuring us he does). After completely whiffing his attempt at saving his “daughter”, she (SPOILERS) is sold into sex slavery and dies of a heroin overdose. It’s a sorta “what the fuck?” shocking story development, the type you’d see in, you guessed it, a Death Wish movie!
(As a quick aside; You’ll notice I’ve put “daughter” in quotes three times now. That’s because the relationship he has with her is never really fully fleshed out; I think she is supposed to be the daughter of one of his old field hands that he kinda adopted? But her aunt also lives with them, but seems to be a live-in maid? They try to hammer in the idea that Rambo is her “true father”, but it feels more like window dressing to give him a reason to want bloody vengeance).
It is at this point that Rambo goes into full vigilante mode, first killing his way through a drug dealer’s mansion, and then luring the survivors to his farm-slash-improvised-Vietcong-Tunnels. This is where I’ll give Last Blood its (very few) flowers; it is violent as fuck. Like, somehow beats out Rambo a few times in pure brutality; there is a scene in the first 30 minutes where Rambo straight up pulls a man’s collarbone out of his body during an interrogation scene (very funny that he does this after interrogating the guy for all of 15 seconds)
The tunnel booby traps are a pretty fantastic 3rd act reveal as we see what appears to be dozens of cartel goons getting sliced, stabbed, and smashed to pieces by several Saw like contraptions Rambo has built. Once the small army is dispatched in all the bloodiest ways imaginable, it is the surviving cartel leader who really gets the show stopper; pinned to the wall by arrows, and his heart ripped out of his chest and shown to him. Tell him how you really feel, Rambo.
Still, even if the last 15 minutes or so kinda rule, Last Blood isn’t really a good movie. Beyond the fact that it never really feels like a Rambo film, its message also might suck the most out of all of these? First one is obviously the best (“the breaking of the American spirit”), with two and three being their own brand of era specific, weird hindsight propaganda (“We definitely could’ve won Vietnam if we tried a little harder” and “Man, those Afghani’s are pretty cool, huh?”, respectively), and then 4 is its own fascinating thing (“The world is made of monsters, but none are bigger than us”). But, 5 provides the most boring conservative message it could; “Mexico sure is scary, huh?”. Like, if Fox News wrote a Rambo film, with the same sort of depth you’d expect from a Tucker Carlson segment.
Last Blood is what happens when a series has not only run out of steam, but has lost their own north star. Rambo was always malleable, but he was also always Rambo. Last Blood’s Rambo isn’t Rambo; just a hollowed husk built for modern conservative reactionary politics.
Specs:
Last time, I swear; The Rambo box is just really freaking sweet you guys. Even after watching all of these nearly back-to-back, this box will remain out on display. It really is just a super cool looking piece of physical media, and with so many releases looking terrible these days, with god awful alternative poster art and thin cardboard sleeves, I very much appreciate this type of thought going into the packaging.
For video, with both of these being semi-recent releases, neither have gotten any sort of video punch-up since their last 4k release. Same with audio. Still, they look and sound great.
For special features, once again both films are packed with extras. Rambo is especially packed with 9 different featurettes and BTS docs, as well as deleted scenes and trailers. Last Blood isn’t as robust, but it still has an hour long production diary featurette, as well as two additional featurettes and trailers. All told, across all 5 films, there are over 11 hours of extras before commentaries. That’s a hell of a lot of special features, especially for 2026.
As we come to the end of our journey through the story of Rambo, I feel a bit discombobulated. It’s been over a decade since I had seen the older films, and watching all 5 in very short order definitely gave me some severe tonal whiplash. What starts so somber and dreary becomes something so bombastic, and then something so vicious and mean spirited.
But, is that not just the story of America, these past 50 years? The somber reflections of the post-war ‘70s, the rally cry for American confidence of the ‘80s, the retirement of the warrior and seeming lasting peace of the ‘90s, the deep, vicious anger and hate of the post-9/11 aughts, and the bewildering, aimless vitriol of the post-2016 election 2010s?
Rambo is, sadly, America. He has moved with the waves of our country’s consciousness for decades now, for better or worse. He is a reflection of our national attitude, molding himself into both how we see ourselves, both consciously and unconsciously, and what we project to the world.
Which…is a pretty bleak thing to say after ending on Last Blood, but, hey; there’s a prequel coming out next year, so maybe this time we’ll get to rewrite Rambo once again, and maybe this time…maybe this time we win.
