The Ending Of Rambo: Last Blood Explained

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.

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. Keep wathing the video to see the ending of Rambo: Last Blood explained!

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No peace | 0:24
What happens to Carmen | 1:15
What happens to Maria | 2:03
Political implications | 2:39
Rambo's ambiguous fate | 3:22
Will it ever really end? | 4:04