Rambo: Last Blood

First Sylvester Stallone decided to do one last installment with Rocky, and now with Rambo. The last Rocky movie was a welcome addition that brought some respect back to the struggling series. But the last Rambo movie was by far the worst one, and even Rambo fans will have to think twice about whether they really want to see it.

The new Rambo is much, much more violent than the previous ones. First, let's look at the body counts:

Somehow Rambo movies have a reputation for being violent. But for a while that really wasn't true. In the first one, Rambo kills one person, and that's because he was forced to. In the second one, Rambo earned his reputation as a killing machine with 58 personal kills. 10 kills by Rambo's friend plus her subsequent death brought the body count to 69. In the third one, Rambo and his friends improved significantly, and the bad guys scored 37 kills, for a total of 132.

In the fourth movie, Rambo does a bit better with 83 kills, and his friends did much better with 40 kills. But the bad guys made the biggest improvement, with an astonishing 113 kills. This results in 236 total kills, which works out to 2.59 per minute—double that of Rambo III.

But it's not just the number of kills that make the new Rambo so disturbing. It's who dies, and how they die. Up until now, good guys had always done pretty well in the Rambo movies, suffering 0 casualties in the first one and 1 in the second. Even in Rambo III, with 37 good guys killed, those 37 were less than half of the 78 kills Rambo made. But in the latest Rambo, the bad guys made more kills than Rambo for the first time, 113 to 83. Many of those 113 were unarmed civilians, some of them children, killed in graphic detail by very big guns, land mines, bombs, bayonets, etc.

So other than all those deaths, what was the movie about? I have no idea. Oh wait, Rambo reunites with his dad at the end after 30 years or so, although we don't actually see it. I hope we can safely assume that he's out of the killing business for good.