• Stallone in Cannes. "'Rambo' is not a political statement"

It may not be true that being bad requires more imagination than the opposite. Yes, and despite what Tolstoy and all those who quote him maintain, bad families end up being as monotonously bored in their misfortune as good ones, happy ones in their bliss. And what goes for family units is the same for film sagas. The expected despite all Rambo's latest installment (the fifth or Last blood , which opens on September 27), for example, is bad . It is because the 80s determined that they turned their hero into the incarnation of that rare empowered conservatism that hates both the progressives and the poor (for lazy people) and tax lovers (for those outside the pleasure of inheriting) , and it is by simple carelessness. That is, it is bad without wanting to be, by accident, for thinking about something else, for stupidity, for lack of imagination , for lack, attentive, for evil. Are we facing the worst movie of the year? Perhaps. But what is relevant is not only his privileged position in the ranking of the abominable (perhaps only behind the documentary where Sergio Ramos explains why he does not ride a horse), but what his aesthetic stupidity, let's say so, says of us.

The film, to place us, places John Rambo on the border of Mexico. But it does not to exterminate emigrants as it used to eliminate enemies of the empire in Afghanistan or Vietnam, but to the contrary. Indeed, the original intention is good . Already retired, but still with some regret over his conscience, the former marine devotes his last days to caring at his ranch with horses (like Sergio) to a venerable single Mexican mother and her adorable daughter. Also Mexican and, for the moment, without commitment. Our man has a heart and is there to show us that if the emigrant is with the papers in order, he will always be well received. But, as expected, things twist. By an accident of fate involving the ungrateful father who abandoned the creature and a group of Chicano pimps, the young woman will end up in a bad way. The fact that the two most notable villains are embodied by the Spanish impersonators of Cantinflas Óscar Jaenada and Sergio Peris-Mencheta adds color to the matter . All that follows, as it touches, is revenge; a cruel revenge applicable with the same violence to villains as to spectators. That and the most far-fetched illustration of how the southern border of the United States fulfills the mission that Donald Trump and his voters (or vice versa) have entrusted to him: to separate the good from the bad . And so.

They call attention to the efforts of Sylvester Stallone and its director Adrian Grunberg to keep the hero away from the stereotype. But even more striking, for clumsy, is how far they are to get it. It has already been said, it can be bad for the most banal neglect . If we look back, and as Stallone himself insisted on making it clear in the last edition of Cannes, Rambo was not always the Rambo that Ronald Reagan adopted as the patron of his deregulating fury. In his own way, the soldier who fought in Vietnam and that his society does not understand form with Rocky, the boxer who made himself and that his society idolizes, both sides of the same financial mythology . One in front of the other, both contradict each other with the same force that they are confused. No one better than them succeeded in reflecting the meaning of the era that came after the breakup of the 70s. “By the time Rocky or Cororrlado premiered so did Taxi driver and All the president's men . My films were the opposite, ”commented Sly proud and lucid.

It was then, when Reagan took the floor and said that: "After seeing Rambo last night, I know what I will do next time." The phrase is from June 1985. He had just announced the release of the 39 US hostages in Beirut and what the president was sure he would do next time was to liquidate the kidnappers . The second part of the Rambo saga, directed by GP Cosmatos, had been released a month before becoming a success of the public and republicanism. And yet, and as its own author confesses: " Rambo never wanted to be a political statement." In fact, the original, that of the first installment of 1982 directed by Ted Kotcheff, was a guy beset by fear, loneliness and mental problems that has nothing to do with what he would become.

Cornered , or First blood , released a year after the election of Reagan to the presidency, followed the traumatic speech about Vietnam of all the previous cinema. That would not happen in any of the following installments already installed in the Republican-revisionist. The new story said that the Vietnam War was not lost by soldiers, but by bureaucrats . Incidentally, those indicated were both the State and the pacifist goodists . Against the first, a hurray to liberalizing policies, and against the second, two cheers for the arms escalation that fuels both the debt and the obscene contracts between friends. Yes, Rambo was bad, but he knew what was being done.

The problem with this latest installment is that it is bad without wanting to be. By carelessness, we said. At the outset it is proposed as a refutation of each and every one of the barbarities that founded the legend of the hero. But, Rambo is Rambo. And so, between the mannerism of the most experienced horror movies and the most disconcerting naivete, Last blood is exhibited as a champion of that strange stupidity that Twitter and its minions insist on making common sense happen. And this is where everything comes to light: the distance between the Republican Rambo of the 80s and that of 2019 is what separates Reagan from Trump . "Unintentionally wanting," the Chavo del Ocho would say.

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