Review of Son of Rambow (2007) by Mario H — 27 Jun 2010

Quirky in a Napoleon Dynamite meets Be Kind, Rewind sort of way, Son of Rambow follows the adventures of two boys and their attempts to make an action film. Well, not just any action film, but a sequel to "First Blood". The film takes place during the early to mid 1980s (and there are many jokes involving 80s fashion and trends) in a little english community. Will is already an odd kid looking in from the outside, his family belongs to the Plymouth Brethren (a religious order that shuns much of the outside world, including television), and he spends much of the day keeping to himself and drawing in his notebook. Things change for him considerably one day when he attracts the attention of Lee Carter, the school bully who also so happens to be making a film for "Screen Test" (an 80s UK tv show that often featured the homemade films of kids). When Lee Carter invites Will home one day (to use him as a stuntman in his movie), Will is exposed to not only tv for the first time, but also Rambo, thanks to Lee Carter's video pirating business. Flush from seeing Rambo kill hundreds of men, Will concocts a film in which he plays the... well, the son of Rambo.

For a kid-focused movie, it has a lot of realistic blood mixed in with the cartoon violence, almost as if the violent actions only have consequences when it becomes necessary to further the plot. The bully kid isn't very sympathetic, at least at first. He's actually kind of a miscreant, and it seems totally reasonable that the other kids don't want to have anything to do with him. What the film lacks in the laugh out loud humor department, it more than makes up for with personality. In spite of its flaws, I enjoyed it a great deal.