With Rambo: Last Blood, Sylvester Stallone hopes to put an exclamation point at the end
of the five-film series that is John Rambo's story.
Last Blood follows Rambo's struggle to get his niece Gabrielle back from a Mexican cartel
after they abduct her for a human trafficking ring.
Viewers know to expect a bloody confrontation, but that doesn't mean the ending is entirely
predictable.
With that in mind, let's dig into the end of Rambo: Last Blood.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
John Rambo began his cinematic journey in First Blood as a man who was just trying to
find a way to move on in a country that didn't seem to have a place for him anymore.
In the four films since then, Rambo has battled within himself to quell a warrior's rage while
also shooting lots of people.
Peace just doesn't seem to be an option for Rambo.
Stallone said in an interview with Variety:
"You can totally end the story with him going home, having that shot of him going down the
driveway, which is completion.
But a character like that - does he ever really go home?
I jotted down on a Post-It: 'He came home, but he never arrived,' and I went, there's
a movie here.
The warrior can never find peace.
He just can't."
That sense of never truly feeling at peace physically manifests in Last Blood as the
tunnels Rambo digs.
It's also encapsulated in something he tells Gabrielle early on: He never changed, he just
learned to "keep a lid on it."
Through the ultra-violent ending of the film, we see that the lid wasn't on too tight.
"I want revenge."
A hallmark of the Rambo franchise has always been the appearance of a somewhat hopeful
figure in John Rambo's life right when he's at his most hopeless.
That was his mentor Col. Trautman in the first film, and in recent films, it's taken the
form of a woman hoping to convince Rambo to move on with his life.
In Last Blood, that's Carmen, a journalist covering Mexican cartels who lost her sister
to their human trafficking machine.
Carmen cleans John up when the Martinez brothers beat and scar him, then helps him find the
right connections to exact vengeance later.
With Rambo's quest for blood finished, what happens to Carmen?
There's no way she wouldn't hear about his one-man defeat of the Martinez cartel and
all of their enforcers, and it's hard to imagine she'd just be a bystander after forming a
bond with Rambo.
It's quite possible that the aftermath of the film creates an opportunity for her to
step in and tell the world the story of what happened that day on the Rambo family ranch.
Rambo's blood relatives have all died since he returned to America, but he does have a
chosen family: His "niece" Gabrielle and her grandmother Maria, who looks after the Rambo
family estate and takes care of Gabrielle.
The tragic loss of Gabrielle to a cartel-driven drug overdose is the emotional linchpin of
Last Blood, and drives Rambo to action.
Before that happens, though, Maria leaves the Rambo family ranch behind, taking her
memories of Gabrielle with her.
So what happens to Maria?
It seems likely that she's the last living person Rambo would leave any kind of inheritance
to, which would place her at the center of his story as the public learns of his war
with the cartel.
But it's unclear whether she'll choose to return.
Rambo: Last Blood is a human story about a man who feels there's nothing he can do but
fight.
"Something happened that's traumatic."
"He's pushed."
But it's also a story in which a couple dozen members of a Mexican cartel come to Arizona
with assault rifles to kill a guy who just happened to have enough firepower to bring
them all down and blow up half his property while he's at it.
Yes, it's a Rambo movie, but it still exists in a version of our world, so there are bound
to be some political implications stemming from Rambo's last stand against the cartel.
At one point, we see cartel members showing up to a crime scene and walking right through
the police with their guns drawn.
These guys can seemingly do whatever they want with impunity.
After the battle in Arizona, the cartels might not go away, but a greater public focus on
human trafficking could lead to some kind of crackdown, likely at the border.
So what actually happens to John Rambo?
As the film ends, Rambo has just won his battle with the cartel, literally cutting out Hugo
Martinez's heart.
He stumbles onto his porch to sit in a rocking chair and nurse the gunshot wound in his abdomen.
As he does, the camera zooms out, and we see the chair is still rocking as the credits
roll.
Is he alive?
Rambo's ending monologue about cherishing the memories of those he's lost is followed
by a credit montage of moments from all four previous films.
This culminates in a wounded, bloody Rambo climbing on a horse and riding away from the
ranch.
But the film made a point of showing us that Rambo drove his horses away from the barn
to protect them from the cartel.
Did this horse wander back, or is that Rambo's passage into the next life in the form of
a ride into the sunset?
It's certainly up for interpretation.
From First Blood on, the overarching narrative of the Rambo series is violence begetting
violence.
Rambo is a warrior because he's good at it and he was trained to be, but he doesn't start
the fight.
"They drew first blood, not me."
He's pushed to the edge, and then he pushes back.
Then the cycle continues even as he tries to keep a lid on it.
In Last Blood, this sense of being pushed too far culminates in his explanation that
he can never stop as long as innocent people are being harmed.
There's an undercurrent of hope at the end of Last Blood, though, as Rambo's parting
words to the audience meditate on memory and loss.
He doesn't want other people to be like him.
He doesn't want people to get hurt and suffer senselessly.
He just knows he has something inside him that will react when injustice does happen,
though by the end of the film he seems to have found a way to make peace with that through
memory.
If he can draw last blood, maybe it will finally be enough.
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