To be fair, the idea of sending Rambo to Mexico for traffickers and drug cartels is much older than Donald Trump's promise to build a wall on the border. It allegedly circulated in 2009 after the ever-traumatized Vietnam War veteran had caused his last massacre in Burma to date: "John Rambo" turned over over 100 million dollars worldwide, reason enough to think about another part of the film series begun in the eighties ,
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"Rambo: Last Blood": Violent tragedyLead actor Sylvester Stallone, who then directed the show, and David Morell, inventor of the fictional character Rambo, years later developed a story that Stallone described as a "soulful journey" of the veteran and tortured character. It may have become a worthy conclusion to the character, analogous to Stallone's recent "Rocky" and "Creed" films. Perhaps this story would have bowed once more to Rambo's still outstanding first-move "First Blood" of 1982, which critically grappled with war traumas and rejection of Vietnam veterans after their return to the US.
But in the end, the Mexico story was filmed. The film was directed by Adrian Grunberg, who had previously shot only one film, the Mexico-based jail exploitation "Get The Gringo" with Mel Gibson. Although Stallone wrote the screenplay for the fifth Rambo film, but said he had no time to direct himself.
John Rambo does not want to fight anymore - but he has to
As complicated as its genesis may be - it has become so simple "Last Blood". It is a one-dimensional and surprise-thriller thrilling tormenting boring on his final excess of violence. At the same time, of course, the painfully reactionary plot is a dream for Trump and his hardcore followers.
But John Rambo, whom you meet in "Last Blood", really does not want to fight anymore. And if you remember correctly, then he did not want that in part two, three and four anymore. But he has to. Viril, but visibly aged (Stallone was born in July 73), he lives on his family's farm in Arizona and rides horses. When it storms in the mountains, he volunteers to help people in need, otherwise he digs melancholy at a widely branched tunnel and corridor system under the ranch. Superficially he seems satisfied and balanced, but deep inside him, in the tunnels and corridors of his soul, it still works.
In the video: The trailer for "Last Blood"
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The eruption is dawning when Rambo's foster daughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal) wants to travel to Mexico to visit her biological father. She and her grandma, who raises Rambos household, are the good Mexicans in this woodcut scenario. Let it be, says Rambo, who sometimes stares into the distance and looks a bit crazy: the world is a bad place, and that will never change. But, the 17-year-old flutes, he himself would have changed. No, that's not true, he replies, he is still the same, he just keeps the lid on it. This refers to the closure of the pill box with the psychotropic drugs, which he swallowed daily.
It comes as it must: Gabrielle is lost in Mexico, is enslaved by a drug and trafficker syndicate. Rambo stops the medication and whets his big knife again. The showdown will take you back to the small, American-American ranch, which will become the torture course for an army of generic Latino darklings. "Last Blood," like any Rambo movie, is also a western, "The Black Hawk," with updated enemy and fear images.
"Rambo: Last Blood"
USA, 2019
Director: Adrian Grunberg
Screenplay : Sylvester Stallone, Matthew Ian Cirulnick
Performers: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Yvette Monreal, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Adriana Barraza, Óscar Jaenada, Joaquín Cosío
Distribution: Universum Film
Length: 99 minutes
FSK: free from 18 years
Start: 19 September 2019
Violent tragedy
Once again, Rambo is unleashed as the god of slaughter to resolve conflicts that can not be resolved by civilian means - or are so complex that thinking about all social, social, and political factors alone causes a headache. Self-justice thrillers such as "Last Blood" seem like coke against complicated contexts: they simulate simple solutions and intoxicating salvation.
That was already the case in the revisionist "Dirty Harry" and "Death Wish" scouts of the seventies and eighties - and has recently been experiencing a revival in an increasingly reactionary zeitgeist with cinema series such as "Taken" or "John Wick". At best, these revenge phantasms provide a fictionalizing agent for aggression that will (hopefully) not discharge in reality thereafter.
The depressing thing about the intricate figure of Rambo is that in this ultimately exploitative context of exploitation and delusion he always remains the dumb tool to which any connection with the enlightened civilian collective must be denied. Violence is the only solution he knows. Worse, it's his only function. And so, for almost four decades now, Rambo Golem has remained tormented and abused in isolation and alone at the end of this episode. A tremendous tragedy.
