Rambo 1: reluctantly fights ("I didn't do anything!") Rambo 2: reluctantly fights ("In prison at least I know where I stand.") Rambo 3: reluctantly fights ("I put in my time. My war is over!") Rambo 4: reluctantly fights ("I can't help you. I don't want to.") Rambo 5: MOTIVATED TO KILL 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 Rambo: Last Blood is a hollow, self-contained sequel that manages to be both inconsistent and completely unnecessary for the character. The main plot points are so brief and uninspired that I am not sure why they didn't just cut out the entire first hour and summarize it in a cue card at the beginning. The girl who gets captured is a brand new, unknown, stubborn, and unlikable character made up for this film, essentially so she can be used as a prop to provoke Rambo's rage. This would have been forgivable had the film been honest about not wanting to do the drama and just jumped into the action. Instead we get a half-baked and uninteresting first hour trying to convince us why Rambo should care about her. The film takes a bloodlust angle. Having just watched the first four installments, this is inconsistent to a degree with his character in that it's the only Rambo where he is actually motivated inside himself to go kill-rather than a victim to the system used and exploited for his supersoldier training in a way that places him in a moral dilemma he cannot refuse, like how it always has been with every other Rambo film. Some are calling this MAGA: The Movie. There is a 20-second sequence where John Rambo goes rogue and is crossing the US-Mexico border back into the United States. He stops his truck at a flimsy little wooden fence in a field in the middle of the night, then rams the truck through the fence with ease. He goes on to lure a group of Mexican criminals, rapists, gang members, & murderers across the border to trespass onto his property where he proceeds to gun them down one by one. This film is every xenophobe's fantasy. The final half hour is just a series of deaths the enemies walk right into without any kind of resistance or forethought. Rambo is not challenged whatsoever. It is simply a massacre, like watching an old man slaughter goats. One redeeming quality of this film is the score from Brian Tyler. He takes Rambo's Battle Adagio theme from the previous film and mixes in some A Monster Calls (Fernando Velàzquez) and LOTR (Howard Shore). This song takes place in a memorable scene just before the Trump wall advertisement. Last Blood is legitimately not a good Rambo film. It isn't quite "pretend it never existed" bad, but it is quite a step back after the large step forward that was the previous installment. Disappointed.

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