Metacritic reviews

This movie is the product of truly deranged minds. It’s a must-see.

Rambo: Last Blood captures everything that's gone wrong with this action franchise over the years.

The character deserves better, and so does the audience.

As a last hurrah for a once great action icon, Rambo: Last Blood is a damp squib. Put your headbands at half mast and remember him from his glory days.

There’s still a thrill seeing Stallone dig out a classic character for one last rumble, but this is formulaic action fare.

On the surface, Last Blood may be a mess of B-movie contrivances, but like its world-weary namesake, it’s also a timely window into the vanity of violent solutions, and why brutality is only viable when fighting for a lost cause.

Here, it’s the screenwriters, not the cartel, who should be held accountable for conjuring a virginal relative only to violate and degrade her.

Rambo lumbers to the finish line in the flaccid fifth installment, which is a Frankenstein’s monster of badly photocopied references to the previous movies, limply strung together with the laziest of screenplays.

What’s especially pitiful about this installment, which has been given a perfunctory dark-action look by cinematographer Brendan Galvin (“Self/less”), is how often Stallone tries to give psychic heft to the wounded-warrior part of his creation, as if he were Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers” and not just a monosyllabic killing machine easily triggered.

Cringemakingly written and clunkily directed, and even the final action sequence runs out of steam after a minute or so.