Sylvester Stallone back for Rambo’s fifth cranky kill-fest

In this surprise fifth outing of Rambo, Stallone moves like a stretch Hummer attempting a U-turn in a suburban driveway and speaks so incoherently you’ll think you’re listening to someone mumbling at the bottom of a mineshaft.

With Rambo: Last Blood, we are presented with a surprise fifth outing for Sylvester Stallone’s relentlessly redoubtable vengeance machine, John Rambo.

We first made the acquaintance of the man all the way back in 1982, and it is not unfair to state that his many anger-mismanagement issues have only continued to worsen over the past 37 years.

After spending much of his career playing away at far-flung locales such as Thailand, Afghanistan and Burma, Rambo is finally granted a home game.

That’s right. John Rambo is back in the good ol’ US of A once more — his late dad’s ranch in Arizona, to be exact — for his latest cranky kill-fest.

No-one in their right mind would go hailing Last Blood a classic. Most would be reluctant to go as far to call it a movie.

John Rambo returns to the USA in this fifth installment. Picture: Lionsgate

However, completist collector-types who want to boast they’ve seen the lot will gladly sit through an opening hour of calamitously clunky set-up for a final half-hour of Rambo going brutally bananas on a major Mexican crime syndicate.

Sleazy, greasy stereotypes all, the menacing Mexicanos have sex-trafficked Rambo’s beloved niece, and signed their own collective death sentence as a result.

Rambo heads south of the border for a while to smack ‘em around a bit, then heads home to rig his property with a bewildering array of booby-traps for when the enemy inevitably requests a rematch.

The violence in this picture is arguably the most vicious to ooze down a screen in 2019. Bones are snapped like toothpicks. Hearts are hacked out of chests. Heads say goodbye to shoulders.

While Rambo teeters on the brink of losing his marbles, you will be fighting with all your might not to lose your lunch.

Stallone moves like a stretch Hummer attempting a U-turn in a suburban driveway in Last Blood. Picture: Lionsgate

As for 73-year-old Stallone, he spends the picture concentrating manfully on forming partial sentences between committing acts of complete butchery.

If what he is doing here can be considered a performance — and there are moments it seems Stallone is unaware the cameras are rolling — then his work ranks as the strangest by a leading man in living memory.

Stallone moves like a stretch Hummer attempting a U-turn in a suburban driveway, emotes like an Easter Island statue, and speaks in a voice so impossibly deep and consistently incoherent you would swear you are listening to someone mumbling to themselves at the bottom of a mineshaft.

RAMBO: LAST BLOOD (R18+)

Director: Adrian Grunberg (Get the Gringo)

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Yvette Monreal, Paz Vega.

Rating: *1/2

If at first you don’t succeed, kill, and kill again