Surely Rambo 5 is flogging a dead horse?

Okay then, Sylvester Stallone is set to play John Rambo one last, last time as he goes up against a Mexican drug cartel.

Did you ever get the feeling that the entire world had lost the plot? Honestly, I’m still struggling to come to terms with the fact that this isn’t a (very) belated April Fool’s joke. I thought the 2008 Rambo was the ultimate exercise in dead-horse flogging. But now John Rambo and his armour-piercing Zimmer frame are fighting coke barons.

Sly Stallone just turned 68. When he made Rocky Balboa in 2006, Stallone scotched rumours of a seventh film by stating, “who’d he be fighting, arthritis?” Yet he’s going back to John Rambo, once the outsider Vietnam veteran screwed over by an ungrateful small American town; later the violent poster boy for Reagan-era anti-Communism. Because if all of Mad Ronnie’s Evil Red Empire shtick didn’t convince you to back ’Mrka in the 80s, what better than a loony with an M60 belt-fed machine gun and an infinite supply of bullets wiping out the entire population of the USSR single-handedly?

Isn’t it about time someone took the ageing action heroes of this world to one side and said, “just stop it and retire gracefully”. Yes, RED was a brilliant actioner (no comment on RED 2), the Expendables movies can be fairly amusing, but there has to be a limit. Are we going to see Rambo 9, where a wizened hero trundles around the jungles of Central Africa on a mobility scooter like some sort of turbo-charged Davros? I’m guessing it’ll be released in the same year as Indiana Jones and the Prostate of Peril. Having said that, I’d pay money to see Stallone packing a pair of miniguns on his wheelchair, blasting away at anything that moves while screaming about building a new race of Daleks.

Still, as long as audience’s keep watching ’em, Tinsel Town will keep churning out endless sequels and keep attacking the dead ’os with a cattle prod. In the meantime, Top Gun 2 anyone?

I’ll get me coat…