Rambo: Last Blood and the Importance of Character Motivation

 

Image Credit: Lionsgate Films

WARNING. No Rambo film is a mind-bender full of surprises but this post does contain spoilers. If you haven’t seen Rambo: Last Blood but plan to, know that reading further will tell you more about the plot than you might want to learn. With that said, let’s continue!

 

Those of you who are writers, and my assumption is that a large portion of my blog’s audience falls into this category, may scoff at me using a Sylvester Stallone movie as a writing exercise. You shouldn’t. The man was nominated for a writing Oscar for his Rocky screenplay. The two roles he’s best known for, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo have been featured in 13 feature films. The man knows how to develop a character. Which makes it all the sadder that John Rambo seems to have finished his life story in 2019’s Rambo: Last Blood. The movie was critically panned and did less at the box office than any of its predecessors. As a fan of the series, I held off on watching it to avoid a letdown. I finally caved recently and while I tend to agree with the critics, the truth is it wouldn’t take much to make Rambo: Last Blood a better film. Sometimes the best way to learn how to be a better writer is to take a deeper look into a work that’s a near-miss.

Part of the problem with Rambo: Last Blood appears to be film executive meddling. At 89 minutes the film is too short. The Director’s Cut clocks in at 101 minutes and repairs some of the damage. The theatrical cut leaves out too much of Rambo’s motivation. He’s an old man now. The last time we saw him was 11 years ago working as a solitary boatman in the jungles of Burma. Now he’s retired on his deceased father’s Arizona farm where he lives with his niece Gabriela and her grandmother, Maria. Why did he build a network of tunnels beneath the property? How has he quelled his violent nature? How has he kept his battle skills honed despite this seemingly peaceful existence? An opening scene that’s only available in the Director’s Cut depicts Rambo saving a woman from a flood, but failing to save her friends. He then morosely compares that shortcoming to his failure to save his friends in Vietnam as he discusses the incident with Maria after he returns home. The scene isn’t perfect, but it does help fill in some of the missing backstory.

Later, Rambo suggests rather than leave to a party, Gabriela invite her friends to the farm to party in his Vietcong-like tunnels.  The tunnels full of guns, knives, and his precious war memorabilia. As a responsible parent this is obviously a horrendous idea, but it also was a screenwriter misstep. The friends never appear in the film again so this is senseless diversion from the story. Worse, it misses a golden opportunity to depict his solitude and inability to let go of his violent past. What if she had asked him if they could party in the tunnels instead? What if he’d then explained how dangerous they are? What if he’d told her he trusted no one down there but her, the most precious thing left in the world to him? Wouldn’t that create better foreshadowing of the film’s final showdown? Wouldn’t it have also helped build our understanding of how strongly he felt about her and why he’d go on a bloody rampage to avenge her? Maybe he’d suggest she have the party in the farmhouse instead? Perhaps he could lurk in the shadows of his underground lair listening to the happy sounds and lights of her life, too emotionally haunted and socially awkward to join them. How much better would that have established his mental state and her place as the love of his dark life?

We also don’t get enough of Gabriela’s treacherous friend Gizelle’s motivation. Yes, we see that she doesn’t have much money and yes, both Maria and Rambo describe the young woman as bad news, but it appears she tricked Gabriela into coming to Mexico for the sole purpose of selling her into sex slavery. That’s a pretty terrible act for a friend, even a bad one. A one or two minute scene of the bad guys beating Gizelle up, threatening a member of her family, or some similar horror if she doesn’t help them kidnap new girls would have made this terrible act much easier to believe.

Once we meet the bad guys, a pair of sex-slaver brothers named Hugo and Victor Martinez, there is another cut scene of their seemingly regular battle for who is in charge and why they need more girls as Hugo negotiates with a crime boss named Don Miguel. The scene is a good one and it’s a shame it was cut, but adding it back would have been even more useful if it was expanded a bit. After the turning point in the film where Rambo kills Victor and taunts Hugo into coming to Arizona for revenge, Hugo leads dozens of armed men to Rambo’s farm while dressed in tactical gear and using military commands. The man clearly isn’t your typical pimp. What is his background? Is he a former soldier? Where did he learn this stuff? A line or two in the scene with Don Miguel where Hugo explains why he’d make such a good partner because of his military background and government connections would have fleshed out his character and helped his turn into bad ass squad leader make a lot more sense.

Finally, there is a scene before Rambo murders Victor where he visits the intrepid reporter who nursed him back to health after his first encounter with the Martinez brothers. He asks for her help one last time. The scene is clearly just an excuse to allow Rambo his monologue about grief and wanting that grief to be the last thing Hugo sees before he dies and I don’t have an issue with that, but the screenwriter forgot to actually show us what “help” Rambo came for. Rambo already knows the location of the Martinez’s lair. The reporter doesn’t accompany Rambo there. What was the motivation for Rambo’s visit before exacting his revenge? An easy explanation might have been that he needed the reporter to tell him when Victor would be home while Hugo was out. Or maybe the brothers were at another location and Rambo needed to know where that might be. Perhaps he could have asked her to report the story of Gizelle’s role in the crime. Whatever the explanation, the scene needs one.

What I find remarkable is that none of these additions would have cost much budget. They’re just a minute of dialogue here and there, maybe 10-15 minutes total. All the expensive action scenes work just fine. Rambo: Last Blood doesn’t fail because it’s a bad action film or a poor end to John Rambo’s life story. It fails because it doesn’t take the time to show why the characters do what they do.