Lots to like, not like about 'Rambow'
"Son of Rambow," an audience and critical hit at the last Sundance Film Festival, has its moments -- both good and bad.
It's a very sunny, loud, fitfully likable British comedy about two '80s school kids from unusual backgrounds who go nuts over Sylvester Stallone after seeing his '80s super-role as fierce-eyed commando Vietnam vet loner John Rambo in "First Blood."
They decide to make their own movie about Rambo's son carrying on the family tradition.
Their brainchild, "Son of Rambow," is a laughably crude movie, full of cornball scenes, idiotically dangerous stunts, cheesy costumes and primitive camerawork.
The two are obviously having a ball doing it. And writer-director Garth Jennings ("A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") obviously has a ball showing them to us.
Jennings loads the film with slick, scintillating images and flashy MTV style, then invites us to laugh at the boys' primitive, naïve movie work, which created a "Be Kind, Rewind" level film.
"First Blood," directed by Ted Kotcheff in 1982, was the first of the Rambo movies, the the one where the character really had some mythic presence and power.
The others (I haven't seen the fourth yet) were increasingly cartoons.
In fact, if you forgive its shabby zero-level production techniques, "Son of Rambow" doesn't seem all that dramatically inferior to "Rambo: First Blood, Pt. 2" and "Rambo III."
Nor does the friendship of Will and Lee seem too much deeper than the Rambo-Trautman relationship, which they try to replicate in their own dumb little film.
But Jennings wants it to be. He wants us to sympathize and even identify with these two loners and movie-loving misfits. Initially shy little artist Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), has just lost his dad in the Falklands, and his family are religious zealots.
School bully/over-indulged rich kid Lee Carter (Will Poulter) has lots of toys to play with, like the camcorder they use to shoot "Son of Rambow."
Will is a shy artist who fills notebooks with sketches and comic book panels and is isn't allowed to watch TV.
Lee is a trouble-making future stud, who swaggers around like a meaner James Dean or a sadistic River Phoenix, sneering at authority. He's behind that camera, calling the shots, while Will does storyboards and undergoes absurd hazards to play Rambow.
As they shoot the picture, Lee brings Will out of his cocoon of repression and religiosity.
The young auteurs are victimized by a clique of school thugs, headed by narcissistic French exchange student Didier (Jules Sitruk); these aesthetic terrorists take over the movie and drive the two friends apart.
Didier as the villain is a little too preachy even as they tried to take over his world.
Didier, unfortunately, seems even less at home in Rambo Land than Will, and better equipped to impersonate a French Peewee Herman.
Perhaps this classic stud-and-intellectual-style movie friendship is too strong for the stylish little romp "Son of Rambow" shows early promise of being.
"Son of Rambow"
2 1/2 stars
Starring: Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Neil Dudgeon, Jules Sitruk and Jessica Hynes
Directed and written by: Garth Jennings
Other: A Paramount vantage release. MPAA rating: PG-13; 1 hour 36 minutes