“When you’re pushed,” John Rambo once said, “killing’s as easy as breathing.” In his decades-long career as an action-movie icon, Rambo has been pushed plenty.

In 1982’s First Blood, the traumatized Vietnam vet ran afoul of a small-town sheriff in the Pacific Northwest and proceeded to all but level that town in a quest to simply be left alone. In 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, he was extracted from prison and sent back to Vietnam on a hunt for American POWs, slaughtering Soviet and Vietnamese communists in service of one of the great American right-wing myths. In 1988’s Rambo III he journeyed to Afghanistan to rescue his old mentor from Soviet captivity, and in the process helped the country’s mujahideen fighters make the place Russia’s Vietnam. And in 2008’s inimitable Rambo, he rained death upon a Burmese warlord in order to free missionaries who’d been tending to he needs of the country’s oppressed Karen minority.

And now, in Rambo: Last Blood, he kills some guys who killed his niece.

Directed by Adrian Grünberg from a script he co-wrote with star Sylvester Stallone, Last Blood strips the Rambo franchise of any overt political ideology whatsoever. He’s not on a rescue mission, at least not for long. He’s not fighting for his country, or for some nostalgic, patriotic version thereof. He’s spilling blood because he wants to — because he feels he needs to. It’s all red; no white, no blue.

I wrote about Rambo: Last Blood and how it strips the Rambo myth down to straight-up murder for Thrillist. It’s a sequel of sorts to my piece on the 2008 Rambo film on its tenth anniversary. As a body of work, the Rambo movies—one of two film franchises based on Sylvester Stallone’s idea that watching other men destroy his perfect body is inherently interesting—are so strange and fascinating to me.