Son of Rambow (12A)

Music video director Garth Jennings’ second feature follows two schoolboys in the rural English suburbs of the early Eighties as they form an unlikely friendship.

Protagonist Will (Bill Milner) is a member of religious sect the Plymouth Brethren and as such lives a sheltered, grey existence a world apart from the thriving youth culture of TV, film andmusic of which he is not allowed to be a part.
His outsider status inadvertently throws him together with school misfit Lee Carter (Will Poulter), who is trying to put together a film toenter into a national TV talent show.

The turning point comes as Will happens to watch a pirated version of Rambo at Lee’s house and finds it lifts the lid on his bursting childhood imagination. Suddenly Lee’s film takes on a whole new dimension as this spirited youngster throws himself wholeheartedly into the project. It’s a cute set-up and one which naturally makes for some light-hearted stunts early on as Will allows himself to be catapulted, swung and shot at to a degree that would have today’saverage health and safety suit chewing their clipboard to shreds.
These brief montages amuse just as Jack Black and Mos Def’s antics did recreating classic Hollywood in Be Kind Rewind. 

However, while these skits are great for YouTube, they barely add up to a few minutes and aren’t enough to hold a film together in themselves.
And although it might seem lazy to overly compare Son of Rambow to Gondry’s film, it does suffer from many of its shortfalls too. It’s stronger on characterisation but is similarly crucially letdown by a lack in basic storytelling skills.

Once you get past the fun of ultra-violent Hollywood being recreated by kids in English backwoods and gardens, along with some inevitable nudge-nudge wink-wink period references for the obsessively nostalgic, there is a pervading drift to the story after about half an hour.
It was a similar problem with Jennings’ version of The Hitchkiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This might all seem harsh criticism of a film low in budget yet playful in tone, but one can’t help feeling it’s something of a missed opportunity or at least one that might have worked better as a shorter, one-off  TV drama.
It does touch on social issues, delving behind both Will and Lee’s troubled, fatherless home lives and the conflict it brings, but perhaps not as much as it could have done. 
And a subplot about French exchange pupils, including an amusingly dandyish New Romantic, is occasionally diverting, but sits awkwardly by the main story.

Its saving graces are in its careful evocation oftime and place and in its cast of young home movie stars. Poulter as Lee Carter is a suitable mix of the cocksure and vulnerable, if a little stage schoolArtful Dodger in his delivery.
 
The real star here, though, is Milner as Will who combines aguileless innocence and sense of charged wonderto a point that almost elevates Son of Rambow to something much greater.And at least here we have a British film withnary a mockney accent, period frock or floppy fringe in sight, which is always something to be thankful for these days.

Although they are different films, this festival hit’s off beat premise bears much in common with Michel Gondry’s recent Be Kind Rewind. And its decidedly mixed success at fitting that concep tinto a workable storyline is also on a par with Gondry’s film.