It’s official: there’s bad blood over Rambo: Last Blood.
Adrian Grunberg and Sylvester Stallone’s blood-soaked actioner drew the ire of film critics when it premiered late last week (our review), with many calling out the racial undertones and gratuitous violence, the latter of which appears to have taken precedence over any and all development on the part of John Rambo. It even led the character’s founding father, author David Morrell, to voice his own dismay, after he admitted to feeling “embarrassed” to have his name associated with Last Blood.
Suffice it to say, Grunberg and Stallone’s Rambo movie fell flat, but there is evidence to suggest that the film is performing decidedly better among audiences. For one, it scooped up a fairly reasonable $19 million at the weekend box office – just shy of the Brad Pitt-led Ad Astra – while the official Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score now sits at 85 percent. A helluva lot higher than the Tomatometer reading of just 28 percent, which reads as so:
Like the sequels that preceded it, Rambo: Last Blood is content to indulge in bloody violence at the expense of its main character’s once-poignant story.
This apparent discrepancy between critics and viewers remains consistent across both IMDb and Metacritic, where Last Blood notched a mere 29 review score, yet holds a user score of 8.5 out of 10. IMDb is similar, given its own user base currently ranks Rambo: Last Blood as 7.0 out of 10. There is, of course, every chance that some Internet users are artificially inflating audience scores for the hell of it. Forget review bombing, Last Blood‘s audience score may come down to review boosting…
In any case, Rambo: Last Blood is now playing across theaters nationwide, though whether this spells the end of Stallone’s action-packed franchise is still up for debate. There were murmurings of a potential Rambo prequel prior to the arrival of Last Blood, but the overwhelmingly negative response may send studio heads running. As always, time will tell.
