Samuel Wear

I like violence, I like sex, I like motorcycles. How could I not like a movie that traffics in these things? Well, I didn't, probably because Hell Ride peddles these things to the exclusion of the stuff that really matters in a movie: interesting characters in an interesting story. What it delivers instead is gratuitous to the point of being repetitive and boring. Every woman is thirty seconds from being topless. Every dude is sun-baked, alligator-skinned and laconic. Dialogue tries so hard to be witty that it comes across as fake and put-on. The violence is senseless and without originality. There is simply nothing in this movie that I enjoyed.

This movie borrows the look and feel of the original two Alien movies while infusing elements of Blade Runner. Lots of jump scares and plenty of dread. The sound design is immersive, at turns industrial or biological, and at all times excellent. But the story is a bit muddled, the biology that underpins the film makes no sense (face huggers deposit eggs into people and sometimes they're tiny xenomorphs but sometimes they're eggs... that get born... and then produce other aliens? Gestation is no longer a thing? And growth from the size of a melon to seven feet tall and fully developed in three minutes?!), and the callbacks to earlier films are just unnecessary and over-the-top. The incorporation of magical DNA-fusing black goo is such a 1990s plot point. The digital resurrection of an original cast member is sometimes near-perfect, sometimes unsettlingly imperfect, and at no time necessary. I'll call this movie a mixed bag of a full, but a fun time in the theatre!

After the visceral, violent Rambo (2008), I was hopeful for Last Blood. But while the new movie does deliver violence in spades, its plot contrivances (Rambo apparently digs underground tunnel complexes on his kinda-sister's horse farm... for fun, I guess?) and Deus-ex-Machina character appearances (a journalist conveniently appears at just the right time and place to keep Rambo alive and full of exactly the info he needs to exact his gory revenge) leave the film feeling flat. What we end up with is a movie trying to cast John Rambo as a Charles Bronson Death Wish protagonist, but instead feeling like Taken meets Home Alone. Nothing can top First Blood, and Rambo (2008) made for a fantastic return of America's favorite disaffected war vet. Those are the two best installments in this series, and Last Blood ranks beneath them, coming in above Rambos II and III in that order. That, unfortunately, is a fairly low bar. Last Blood is worth the price of an admission ticket, but you'll leave the theater feeling as hollow as one of John Rambo's empty underground tunnels.