Jason Statham's New Action Movie Beats Sylvester Stallone's Worst Rambo Sequel At Its Own Game

John Rambo, as portrayed by actor Sylvester Stallone, is a controversial character. When he first appeared in 1982's "First Blood," an adaptation of David Morrell's 1972 novel of the same name, the character was fairly close to how he appeared in the book: a Vietnam War veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who is mistreated by his fellow countrymen. That all changed with 1985's "Rambo: First Blood Part II," a movie wherein Rambo, through the act of being deployed back into Vietnam to rescue prisoners of war, symbolically gets to "win" the war that America lost. From there, the rest of the franchise saw Rambo being called upon for assistance by other underdogs involved in impossible or hard-odds conflicts around the world, turning him into a sort of morally-motivated mercenary. While the character eventually stopped resembling the resentful, broken soldier of Morrell's book as he became stronger and more traditionally heroic, he was still a cautionary tale of war.

Bizarrely, 2019's "Rambo: Last Blood" (the latest and, to date, final film in the series) barely has anything to do with a war or its repercussions at all. Instead of John finding himself in the middle of a new conflict between the powers that be, he gets on the bad side of a Mexican cartel once they kidnap the young daughter of a friend of his. More than any previous installment, "Last Blood" makes Rambo feel incidental, and almost like he's a different character. Perhaps this was Stallone's attempt to spin the character off into new directions and move him away from the war theme, but it's a remarkably awkward (not to mention unfortunately xenophobic) effort.

Fortunately, Stallone has both been bested and redeemed himself with the same movie. "A Working Man," the latest from director David Ayer, stars Jason Statham as Levon Cade, an ex-Royal Marine, who is drawn into a conflict with the Russian mafia when a friend of his discovers his young daughter has been kidnapped. "A Working Man" is essentially "Last Blood" done right, and it's fitting that Stallone — who produced the movie and co-wrote the script — was an integral part of making it happen.

A major issue that "Rambo: Last Blood" suffers from is the fact that it feels like John Rambo accidentally stepped into the wrong movie. While this idea could work if it was intentional, "Last Blood" isn't really a fish-out-of-water story. Instead, it feels like Stallone was trying to see how the character would function in a different environment, using his war experiences as a set of skills that could be applied to trying to rescue an innocent girl from the cartel. Unfortunately, it's an odd fit, especially as the fifth (and ostensibly final) movie in the franchise. It's as if the final "John Wick" movie had Wick get hired by a team of super spies on a mission to save the world; there's some overlap of tone and genre, but it's too hard a pivot to work naturally.

That's not the case with "A Working Man" and Levon Cade. Of course, one major help is the fact that the film is the first movie in a (hoped-for) franchise, so there aren't any prior installments for it to conform to or clash with. But even leaving that aside, the movie presents Cade in a way that allows for the character and the story to work in harmony with each other. To wit: when Cade's friends find out that their daughter has been kidnapped and sold into human trafficking, Cade is compelled to help them not just because they're his pals and his employers, but also because he's struggling to keep his own daughter, Merry (Isla Gie), protected and cared for. At a key moment in the film, Cade even challenges one of the traffickers to try and understand how monstrous trafficking is, and realizes that the gangster can't fathom it because they don't have a daughter of their own.

In other words, "A Working Man" is a Levon Cade movie, while "Rambo: Last Blood" is a movie that happens to have John Rambo in it.

It would be easier to defend "Rambo: Last Blood" if it either fit more neatly into the "Rambo" franchise and character, or if it were simply a rollicking action film. Instead, Stallone, co-writer Matthew Cirulnick, and director Adrian Grünberg make the movie a relentlessly downbeat affair. Perhaps the filmmakers were attempting to bring John Rambo back to his melancholy, pessimistic "First Blood" roots, but in doing so made a film which feels too uncomfortably like a xenophobic treatise. It has its moments for sure — the kills are outrageously brutal, building upon the ultraviolence of the series that had previously peaked with 2008's "Rambo" — but, like I said, it would work better either if the Rambo character wasn't involved, or if the movie wasn't so mired in portentousness. Even 1986's "Cobra," a Stallone-penned and starring action film featuring thinly-drawn reactionary villains, was more quirky and fun than "Last Blood" is.

"A Working Man" sees Stallone and Ayer rectify this problem and then some. To be sure, the film doesn't take the topic of human trafficking lightly, and the plight of the kidnapped girl, Jenny (Arianna Rivas), is appropriately harrowing. However, it's not sensationalized either. The same can't be said for the cartel victim, Gabriela (Yvette Monreal), in "Last Blood," who is forced into drug addiction before dying of an overdose. "A Working Man" has its topical issues cake and eats it too, depicting how the Russian criminal underworld in the film has tendrils everywhere (even into the police department) while making the gangsters themselves look believably, pathetically human instead of turning them into propagandistic caricatures.

Most of all, "A Working Man" never loses sight of the fact that, despite the topics at hand, the film can still have a sense of fun and excitement. Retaining those qualities is the savviest way to go, for it makes Levon Cade into the blue collar underdog folk hero that Stallone was looking to turn Rambo into. So while "Last Blood" continues to dangle awkwardly at the end of the "Rambo" series (unless Stallone decides to give the franchise one more last go), "A Working Man" functions as the potential start of a new series, as well as further confirmation that the duo of Ayer and Statham is a winning one. Most happily, the film is vindication for Stallone as a writer, proof that his story could work well after all.