Recently, Sylvester Stallone said goodbye to Rocky Balboa, his most famous and most successful character. However, there's another icon of 1980s cinema that Sylvester Stallone brought to life, and now it's time to see him one final time as well. John Rambo will be back in Rambo: Last Blood, and a new trailer gives our first real look at the plot of the film. Check it out.
The first trailer for Rambo: Last Blood showed us Rambo being a badass but didn't give us much context for what we were seeing, the new trailer, posted to Sylvester Stallone's Instagram, gives us a bit more detail.
At the end of the previous Rambo film, John had returned to his family farm, seemingly retiring from from the life he had known. We see him caring for a young woman (played by Yvette Monreal), but she's apparently kidnapped from a club, and Rambo goes in to try and rescue her. He sees her as family, she calls him Uncle John, though it's unclear if they are actually related. When the drug cartel that has her decides not to play nice, Rambo goes back to what he knows best, violence, in order to get her back.
I've always thought Rambo was an interesting franchise. While the first movie certainly didn't lack in the action department, First Blood was ultimately more of a character driven piece as we watched a man struggling with PTSD, in an era where we didn't talk about such things as much.
The sequels, however, were much more straight forward action movies. With the title of the new film Rambo: Last Blood certainly wants to remind people where the story started, but what we see here falls in line much more with the sequels than the original.
Still, watching Sylvester Stallone deal with psychological trauma doesn't necessarily make for an exciting movie trailer, so it's possible the movie will have that, but that it was simply left out here for marketing reasons.
As far as the action goes, it looks pretty great. Sylvester Stallone may be older, but he certainly still looks like he can take on an entire drug cartel with his bare hands. At this point the older male action hero is practically a genre all on its own. The fact that the new Rambo: Last Blood looks to have more than a little in common with Taken is likely no accident.
Based on the title, we can make a safe guess that this will be the final Rambo movie, if so, it does certainly leave the fate of our hero up in the air. One way or another, John Rambo will likely find peace, but exactly how he comes by that peace is very much still a question.
Rambo: Last Blood opens in theaters September 20.
