Son of Rambow - 21 March 2010

Principal cast: Will Poulter, Bill Milner, Neil Dudgeon, Jessica Hynes, Jules Sitruk, Anna Wing

Film notes: Directed and written by Garth Jennings (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Son of Rambow is a quirky nostalgia piece set in the early 1980s and revolving around an unlikely friendship between two pre-teen English boys. The mismatched friends are Lee and Will. Lee is all boyish machismo—a bit wild, his head full of movies and action-man excitement—whilst the sedate Will comes from a Plymouth Brethren family and has never seen a movie. When Lee gives Will a glimpse of Rambo in First Blood, the friendship is sealed and Will enters the 1980s with a passion. It so happens that Lee has access to a movie camera, and is looking for someone to play the lead in his remake of First Blood. From this point, comic-book humour can take off through the ingenious and death-defying stunts to which Will cheerfully submits himself for the sake of Lee's art and his own liberation. A more touching humour is found in the spectacle of stick-thin boy bodies determined to emulate Stallone/Rambo. The device of the movie-making enterprise allows Jennings to plot some ups and downs in the friendship, and some struggles with the adult world.

The film is a boy's-own fantasy of what an early 80s boyhood should have been like, movie camera in hand. Jennings packs the screen with comic-book sensibility and boy energy, whilst a sentimental tale is also told. The character of Will, and the idea that the discovery of Rambo movies could amount to an epiphany, is a delightful way to revive the wonder value of Stallone's box-office beefcake.