Movies
[Review] ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ is Bloody, But the Wrong Kind of Disgusting
If you want to see truly horrific gore, Rambo: Last Blood is waiting for you. The fifth installment of the popular action franchise features amputations, mutilations, disfigurations, exploderations, and at least one thing I’ve never seen anybody do with a collar bone. It’s gross, and that should be entertaining. But in order to earn that level of violence it oversteps its bounds, and becomes a very disturbing political statement.
Of course, the Rambo movies have always been political. First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II, despite their different tones, reflected the ugly fallout of the Vietnam War. Rambo III found John Rambo teaming up with the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Russians. The confusingly titled Rambo sent Sylvester Stallone’s hero into Burma, to rescue Christian missionaries from victimization. They’re all violent action movies, and some are played more seriously than others, but they’ve always been confrontational, not escapist.
Last Blood picks up ten years after Rambo, with Rambo living on a ranch at the Mexican-American border. He spends his idyllic days breaking horses and digging an elaborate series of underground tunnels, for no particular reason other than they might be useful in an action sequence later. His niece, Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal, Matador), is like a daughter to him, and she’s about to go off to college. But first she wants to confront her absentee father, who fled to Mexico and hasn’t spoken with her in many years.
Rambo tells her not to go, that her father is a bad man and the friend who helped her track him down is a “bad girl,” but Gabrielle goes anyway. And sure enough, she’s almost immediately kidnapped, drugged, and violently forced into prostitution. So it’s up to Rambo to go to Mexico, kill everybody, save his niece, and then kill everybody else.
As a simplistic action movie – setting the franchise’s overt messaging aside for a minute – Rambo: Last Blood is little more than a Taken knockoff. Once again a father figure with a history of violence warns a young woman that anywhere but their home is bad, and the movie agrees with him. The woman suffers horrifically for not taking our hero at his word, which gives him an excuse to kill a lot of people and feel good about it.
It’s an immature fantasy, but it can work if the movie is slick and smart. Rambo: Last Blood isn’t slick and smart. The screenplay, written by Matt Cirulnick (Absentia) and Stallone, has been reduced to its lowest common denominators, establishing characters quickly and then shoving them into a simplistic plot (that is to say, simplistic even by Rambo standards). It genuinely feels like director Adrian Grunberg (Get the Gringo) shot the outline instead of the script.
Of course, the problem with making an oversimplified action movie about a white guy “heroically” butchering non-white people is that, intentionally or not, you’re making violent propaganda. The filmmakers could have picked any villains in the world, and they chose the people that the President is saying American citizens should be scared of. And by presenting Rambo as a symbol of Americana, complete with the Marlboro Man’s ranch and horse, and then setting him loose to exact righteous, ultraviolent vengeance against Mexicans, Last Blood plays into all the xenophobia in the discourse and exploits it for entertainment value.
That’s the part that’s gross. Not the immolations or the decapitations or the stabulations; in a vacuum, that stuff is fantastic. But the fact that we’re supposed to cheer for those acts of violence in support of a political doctrine is in poor taste. By the time Rambo declares “I want you to feel my rage, my hate” it’s clear that the movie finds those emotions to be wholly justified, and even noble.
If you agree with that sentiment, you may enjoy Rambo: Last Blood. If you don’t, you may reject it outright. But if you can somehow watch a movie that directly reflects the modern political discourse and find a way to depoliticize it… even then you’ve only got a 50/50 shot.
The violence is astounding but the film looks cheap and the script is derivative. Stallone tries to play Rambo like he’s “keeping a lid on it,” suppressing his trauma and violence until the climax, but instead he comes across as uninvested, and probably a little bored. Rambo: Last Blood is a subpar action movie, regardless of its themes. But when you consider every hateful sentiment Last Blood cynically attempts to cash in on, this film goes from bad to much, much worse.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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