wanted to be a soldier.” Accomplished guerrilla warrior John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is now a quiet rancher in Bowie, Arizona. He still has an arsenal of weaponry mounted above his bed, but he’s traded his wartime expertise for some horses, an extensive tunnel system built beneath his property, and a niece (Yvette Monreal as Gabrielle) for whom he can bestow his reserved affections. Jarring flashbacks to his various military missions (primarily in Vietnam) plague his day-to-day routines, but his life now is one of peacefulness and solitude – broken up by horse rides with Gaby and dinners with Gaby’s grandmother, Maria (Adriana Barraza).

“People don’t just act bad for no reason.” Before Gaby leaves for college, she wishes to locate her biological father, Manuel, who abandoned her long ago. All she wants is to ask him why he left. Despite Rambo’s pleading for her not to venture across the southern border, Gaby connects with former friend Jezel (Fenessa Pineda), who claims to have found Manuel. Once in Mexico, however, naive Gaby realizes too late that she shouldn’t have wandered into such a dangerous territory.

Stallone struggles to spill his limited speeches from between his stiff, weathered lips, as if most of his facial muscles are now immobile, substituted for decades of rippling limbs. But it hardly matters; he’s here to wreak havoc (chiefly with sharp objects) on villainy, of which “Rambo: Last Blood” has no shortage. Mexico is portrayed as an immediately uncomfortable place, writhing with shady people, filled with decrepit locales and crime-ridden streets, and pulsing with aggression from unglamorous denizens; nowhere is free from a general coarseness and hostility. The country is certainly not shown in a desirable light. Of course, this design helps to indemnify Rambo from the particularly harsh things he’s destined to do when it becomes necessary for him to rescue his niece.

The setup is embarrassingly simplistic, and far removed from the familiar, war-torn environs of Rambo’s past theatrical endeavors. But he nevertheless hefts a blade, holsters a gun, and uses his bare hands to literally tear the flesh away from his targets; the detective work required to locate Gaby is mostly just violent intimidation. From time to time, it’s almost funny how brutal the ex-military man is; the path of destruction he carves is absolutely merciless. Such is the nature of his brand of vigilantism. It’s a good thing that the bad guys are so conspicuously malicious; the more vile they are, the more severe Rambo’s reprisals can be, without tarnishing his role as a protagonist. When he grimly interrogates suspects and batters opponents with a hammer, it’s borderline welcome; the greater the abuse he receives, the greater the punishment he can dish out with action-movie justification.

And he’s still a one-man army, even if he gets momentary aid from a journalist (Paz Vega), bulldozing his way into heavily-fortified arenas to unleash exceptional carnage. Stallone isn’t content delivering a standard revenge picture; he has to do everything in an unusually savage way – from innocent victims succumbing to ruthless gangsters, to ruthless gangsters succumbing to Rambo’s roughshod redresses. And the finale is one of the most barbarous bloodbaths of recent memory, combining the booby traps of “Home Alone” with the mutilative blueprints of the “Saw” films. It’s definitely not intelligent, but the catastrophic machismo is mind-numbingly action-packed. And, as with any movie donning the word “Last” in its title, this probably won’t be the final time audiences are treated to Rambo’s relentless though repetitive reign of retaliation.

– Mike Massie