Hilariously, the movie keeps giving John Rambo what pundits and politicians like to call Participation trophies. Sore Loser: As with his support for Afghanistan in Rambo III, Last Blood finds Rambo on the wrong side of history, once more enacting a conservative fantasy as the guy who’s going to finally win the drug war. And since he became indistinguishable from Rambo’s overblown revenge politics, he’s been unable to let the character die, and just as he can’t stop playing Rocky Balboa (a character that conversely requires him to act), Rambo is a synecdoche for Stallone’s inability to accept his lot in life. Stallone became synonymous with John Rambo, the only veteran able to channel his PTSD into hunting down and killing commies, a fantasy America lapped up in Reagan’s ’80s. It didn’t help that Stallone was in real life a famously tough-talking coward who had never seen a day’s combat in his life and refused opportunities to entertain the troops on USO tours because he was afraid to go to active combat zones. By torpedoing his respectability and becoming a joke people still tell by agreeing to do First Blood Part 2, in which he saves POWs from the clutches of still-vindictive Vietnamese soldiers, that’s where the Stallone of cartoons and talk show impressions is born. Any other former porn star would be content to remain an Oscar-winning screenwriter and critically acclaimed actor, but Stallone didn’t settle for that. The Man, The Myth: Sylvester Stallone’s ego is 10 feet tall, five more than the body housing it. This is a job only a 73-year-old with anger issues can hack to pieces. When she gets a tip he’s across the border in Mexico she goes down to find him against Rambo’s council, and, of course, winds up sold into sexual slavery by a pair of fraternal drug kingpins. ![]() He inherits his father’s horse ranch in Texas and looks after a young horse girl ( Yvette Monreal) whose father ran out on her. ![]() But after massacring a couple hundred people for fun in his fourth outing, he tried to go straight but they … just … wouldn’t … let him. He took on a battalion of cops in First Blood, went back and won the Vietnam war in First Blood: Part 2, accidentally helped create the Taliban by aiding Afghani warriors fight the Russians in Rambo III, and then basically blew all of Burma in half in 2008’s Rambo. Who is John Rambo? Well, he’s the kind of legendary badass killing machine that the government trusts to clean up their messes. A part of my mind and soul got lost along the way.” So intones human rock John Rambo at the end of Rambo: Last Blood, the fifth and, fingers crossed, last installment of the Rambo saga. I tried to come home, but I never really arrived.
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