Review: Son of Rambow (2008) *** 1/2

Bill Milner, Jules Sitruk and Will Poulter in Son of Rambow

Will Proudfoot is a frail looking 11-year-old growing up fatherless in a small town in England in the 1980s. His family belongs to a religious sect that forbids movies or television, but he has an active imagination and he spends hours filling notebooks with colorful drawings and making flip-book animations of monsters wreaking havoc and of airplanes crashing into mountains.

Lee Carter is a boy of the same age in the same town. Largely ignored by indifferent parents, he has boundless energy with little outlet for it. He smokes, bullies his classmates and pirates films at the local cinema using his older brother’s video camera.

Opposites in every way, the two meet one day at school one day when Will is forced to wait in the hall outside of his classroom while his mates watch an educational video and Lee is kicked out of his for making trouble. They’re an unlikely pair, but Lee needs a stuntman for a remake of Rambo: First Blood he plans to enter into a local competition for young filmmakers. When he blows Will’s mind with a pirated copy of the Stallone film, an unusual friendship is born.

So begins Son of Rambow, a charming, funny look at friendship and imagination through the eyes of two kids who’re at an age when anything seems possible and everything seems amazing. It’s the new film from creative team Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith who made their feature film debut with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The two have seemingly boundless creativity and they’ve infused their film with a reckless enthusiasm that makes its a perfect antidote to the usual summer hubbub.

Rambow’s secret weapons are first-time actors Bill Milner and Will Poulter who play Will and Lee. The two bring a naturalness to their performances before the camera without the knowing layer of precociousness that so often infects their smart-mouthed Hollywood counterparts. Thanks to them and thanks to the genuineness of feeling brought by Jennings and Goldsmith, Rambow is refreshingly devoid of irony or hipsterism. It’s a kid’s take on things, rather than an adult impression of a kid’s world.

It should be noted: enjoyment of the Rambo movies is not required to appreciate Rambow, nor is this some kind of a satire of what Rambo has come to represent. It’s about kids’ infatuation with a seemingly invincible superhero and the way it inspires them, nothing more and nothing less.

Charming as it is, Rambow is not a perfect film. It has a ragged, homemade, rough around the edges quality that works both to its benefit and detriment. It captures something of the aesthetic that Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind was reaching for and this is part of the film’s easy charm, but Jennings and Goldsmith pick up characters and ideas and then seem to drop them again without following through. Sometimes the film feels like a jumble of bright ideas and moments that don’t form a cohesive or completely satisfying whole. It’s not a fatal flaw and it was perhaps by design, but a little extra focus and discipline would’ve raised the film to another level.

The film manages to tread a fine line, however. Too much gloss would have ruined it altogether and, as it is, it’s an almost impossible movie not to like. Brimming with clever ideas and fond memories of a certain time and place, Son of Rambow easily wins you over and makes you wish you were 11 again.

Son of Rambow. UK 2007 (Released in 2008). Written and directed by Garth Jennings. Cinematography by Jess Hall. Music score composed by Joby Talbot. Starring Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Jules Sitruk, Jessica Stevenson, Neil Dudgeon and Ed Westwick. 1 hour 35 minutes. MPAA rated PG-13 for violence and reckless behavior. 3.5 stars (out of 5)

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