Sylvester Stallone has played John Rambo for nearly four decades. In Rambo: Last Blood, the fifth film in the series, the character settles onto his late father’s horse ranch in Bowie, Arizona. It does not last. When Gabriela, the granddaughter of his friend María Beltrán, crosses into Mexico to find her biological father, she is drugged and kidnapped by a cartel. Rambo follows her. Adrian Grünberg directs, Stallone co-wrote the script with Matthew Cirulnick, and the film runs 89 minutes. It is a lean machine built for one purpose, and that purpose is the last twenty minutes.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
A Ranch in Bowie, Arizona
The setup is quiet, and for a while that quiet works. Rambo manages the ranch with María, played by Adriana Barraza, and her granddaughter Gabriela, played by Yvette Monreal. He has become a father figure to the girl. The film states this plainly and does not dress it up. He trains horses. He takes his pills. He has nightmares, though the film does not linger on them.
Gabriela’s friend Gizelle, played by Fenessa Pineda, tells her she has found Gabriela’s father, Manuel, in Mexico. María and Rambo both protest. Gabriela goes anyway. Gizelle takes her to Manuel’s apartment, where he tells his daughter he never loved her and never wanted a child. It is a small, ugly scene, and it lands harder than most of the violence that follows.
Then Gizelle takes Gabriela to a club. Gabriela is drugged and taken. That is the hinge of the whole film, and it happens in about ninety seconds.
Stallone Walks Into Mexico Alone
Rambo crosses the border to find her. He questions Manuel and Gizelle. Gizelle leads him to the club where Gabriela was last seen. He confronts a man called El Flaco, played by Pascacio López, who last spoke with her. A woman named Carmen Delgado, played by Paz Vega, follows him.
The cartel is run by two brothers, Hugo and Victor Martínez, played by Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Óscar Jaenada. They beat Rambo, mark him, and take his driver’s license. The license gives them the ranch’s location. A photo of Gabriela in his possession tells Victor who she is. The film is explicit that the brothers will mistreat Gabriela further because of what Rambo did.
Carmen takes him home and nurses him back to health. She tells him she is an independent journalist investigating the Martínez brothers, who killed her sister. Rambo raids a brothel, kills several men, and finds Gabriela, drugged.
The Drive Home
What happens on the drive home is the film’s one honest moment. Rambo thanks Gabriela for giving him hope and meaning. It is not a speech. It is a tired man saying a true thing to a girl he could not protect in time.
Then the cartel kills her. What matters is that Rambo returns to the ranch, and the film turns to what he does about it.
This is where Rambo: Last Blood stops being a rescue film and becomes something else. The rescue failed. The film knows it. It is the only structural choice in the script that carries any weight, and it is worth naming because so little else here does.
Hugo and Victor Martínez Get What They Built
Rambo returns to the ranch and prepares it. He digs tunnels. He sets traps. He waits for the cartel to come to him, and they do, because the driver’s license told them where to go. The last act is a home invasion played in reverse: the invaders are the ones who do not know the ground.
The violence is graphic. Critics called it torture, and the film earns that word. Men are impaled, blown apart, and buried alive. The camera does not look away and does not blink.
Stallone plays these scenes without pleasure. That is the right choice and it is nearly the only one the film makes. He is not quipping. He is working. The tagline says everyone has one more fight in them, and the film treats the fight as labor rather than triumph.
What the Film Does With Mexico
Here the film fails, and it fails in a way that is not a matter of taste. Mexico is not a place in Rambo: Last Blood. It is a corridor of clubs, brothels, and cartel rooms, and the Mexican characters who fill it are drawn almost entirely as victims, criminals, or caretakers.
Paz Vega’s Carmen is the closest thing to an exception. She has a job, a motive, and a dead sister. But she spends her screen time tending Rambo’s wounds and explaining the plot to him. She does not get a scene of her own.
The film drew criticism on release for racist and xenophobic attitudes toward Mexico. That is the reception, and it is a matter of record. This paper’s reading is that the criticism holds up. The cartel is not written as a criminal organization. It is written as the country. That is not a hard call. It is the plain reading of the script.
The Numbers Behind Rambo: Last Blood
The film cost $50 million to produce and $30 million to print and advertise. It grossed $91.5 million worldwide. On paper that is not a disaster. In practice it is a thin return on a franchise film with a global name above the title.
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Production budget | $50 million |
| Print and advertisement costs | $30 million |
| Worldwide gross | $91.5 million |
| Runtime | 89 minutes |
| Metacritic score | 26/100 |
| Critical score | 2.6/10 |
The critical score is 2.6 out of 10.
Brian Tyler Returns, and It Does Not Matter
Brian Tyler came back to score the film, as he did for Rambo in 2008. The music is competent. It is also the least interesting thing here, because the film does not give it anything to do.
The action sequences were praised on release, and Stallone’s performance was too. Both are fair. The tunnel sequence is staged with real spatial logic. You always know where Rambo is and where the men hunting him are, which is more than most modern action films manage. Grünberg, working from a script with two credited writers, keeps the camera close and the geography clear.
But craft is not the problem. The problem is that the film has nothing to say about the violence it spends ninety minutes building toward. It wants the last act to feel like justice. It plays like exhaustion.
What Rambo: Last Blood Leaves Behind
Plans for a fifth film were announced on and off starting in 2008. Different versions were developed and dropped. The film was finally announced in May 2018, a decade after the first round of plans. Principal photography began in October 2018 in Bulgaria and Spain, wrapped that December, and picked up additional photography in May 2019. That history shows on screen. This is a film assembled from parts that were lying around.
A prequel, John Rambo, is currently in production. Watching Last Blood, it is hard to see what the series thinks it still owes this character. The 2008 film ended with him coming home. This one ends with him on a porch, having killed a great many men, and the film treats that as peace.
The film’s defenders will say the point is that Rambo is a weapon and weapons do not retire. That reading is available. It is also generous. A film that wants to make that argument has to show the cost, and Rambo: Last Blood shows the bodies instead. It is not a story about a man who cannot stop. It is a story about a man the script keeps handing fresh targets.
The one thing the film gets right is that Gabriela dies. Not because it is grim, but because it refuses the easy version where the rescue works and the hero rides home clean. Everything around that choice is noise: the tunnels, the traps, the marked hand, the dead journalist’s sister who never gets her own revenge. Strip it down and you have a revenge film that mistakes cruelty for weight.
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