He might have hit pensionable age earlier this year, but 65-year-old action icon Sylvester Stallone is showing no signs of slowing down and retiring to the countryside. The Rocky star is currently filming the crime thriller Bullet to the Head with director Walter Hill and also has The Expendables 2 on his slate, while reports are now emerging that Conan the Barbarian scribe Sean Hood has just delivered a draft for a fifth (and surely final?) outing for John J. Rambo.
Entitled Rambo: Last Stand, the script is the latest attempt to continue the series after 2008’s surprisingly decent Rambo, and follows on from previous efforts that would have seen the Vietnam veteran tackling a South American drug cartel or – in the case of Rambo: The Savage Hunt – a vicious killing machine genetically engineered by the US government. “[Stallone] gave me a book, an older screenplay, and about twenty pages he’d written himself to use as inspiration for the last chapter of the Rambo saga,” Hood told Empire, with his script said to bring the character full circle: “It’s more in line with the small-town thriller of First Blood.”
I’d like to say that Rambo V is a bad idea, but I felt the same way about Rocky Balboa and Rambo and Stallone proved me wrong on both occasions. Of course, the project is far from set in stone and first up for Stallone is The Expendables 2, with director Simon West (The Mechanic) looking to attract a stellar cast of stars including Jason Statham, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mickey Rourke, Steve Austin, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Chuck Norris, John Travolta and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Originally published August 20, 2011. Updated December 6, 2019.
