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SON OF RAMBOW
Written & Directed by Garth Jennings
Produced by Nick Goldsmith
Director of photography, Jess Hall
Edited by Dominic Leung
Music by Joby Talbot
Released by Paramount Vantage
UK. 96 min. Rated PG-13
With Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Jessica Stevenson, Neil Dudgeon, Jules Sitruk & Ed Westwick

This lightweight crowd pleaser is part of a new trend: the making of the fan film. (Along with Be Kind Rewind, Paramount is set to produce a movie on the making of a 1989 shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark by three Mississippi teenagers). And along with last year’s Starter for 10, Son of Rambow takes a nostalgic trip back to 1980s Britain. Though no reference to Thatcherism or labor unrest is made, the main reminders of the era are the soundtrack’s Brit pop (at one point, a school dance becomes a New Wave High School Musical) and the once-hip, now ancient New Romantics look, heavy on the lace.

The inspiration for two budding adolescent filmmakers is the Sylvester Stallone testosterone-saturated actioner First Blood, which introduced the killing machine Rambo. For gullible Will (Bill Milner), viewing the film changes his life; he had never seen a movie until he watches a pirated VHS copy belonging to a schoolmate, the Artful Dodger-like Lee. (Son of Rambow opens with Will reading a biblical passage in a protest outside of a cinema showing the forbidden First Blood fruit.) Will meets Lee when both are sitting out in the hall during class time; Lee, for troublemaking; Will, to avoid watching television because his Christian sect forbids it.

With Lee behind the lens, Will stars as the rescuing son of the captured Rambo. Their goal is to submit the video in a BBC contest. The sight of a scrawny Will, even with war paint and his macho posturing, cannot avoid being cute, but Will Poulter’s performance of the bullheaded Lee resists sappiness. The same can’t be said for the script – even the tough-talking delinquent needs somebody to love, though he would never admit it, especially to a social outcast like Will. Lee, like Will, is fatherless, raised by his negligent, blackmarketeer older brother. But when the coolest kid in school, an androgynous French exchange student who takes all of his fashion cues from Adam Ant, wants to be in Will’s movie, Lee, once calling the shots, now finds himself treated like a lowly production assistant.

The boys’ adventures, just like Rambo’s, stretch credibility, with numerous improbable stunts and an over-the-top climax set in a post-industrial wasteland (now that’s ’80s England). The boys become as superhuman as their hero; their resulting film as raw and a flight of adolescent fancy as Saturday Night Live’s “Lazer Cats!” skits.

The relentlessly cheerful ending/reconciliation elbows the audience into cheering, like everyone else on screen in an “I love you, man” finale. (With all of the sentimentality, you’d think the boys’ next project would be to refashion Steel Magnolias.) The one out-of-the-ordinary strand is the relationship between Will and his church. He has been skipping Bible study and surreptitiously making his film. But in the movies, when it comes to the lopsided contest between the lure of film and God, organized religion doesn’t have much of a prayer. Kent Turner
May 2, 2008