Movie Review: Son of Rambow

No one ever said making a movie was easy, especially when you're a kid and your stuntman is a scrawny boy who belongs to a puritanical religious sect and you've got a French exchange student mugging for the video camera, which you've incidentally "borrowed" from your older brother who will beat you up should you destroy said camera. Thus is the plot of Paramount Vantage's latest film, Son of Rambow, which hits theaters May 2.

The film is set in the 1980s at the height of the video camera age. With major directors such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas tackling heady films, this decade was a time when, for a kid with a camcorder, anything seemed possible, even taking on the production of an action flick in one's backyard.

For Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), anything in secular culture, including movies, is forbidden. Will lives with his sister, dependent grandmother, and widowed mother in a sparse but sufficient-according-to-the-dictates-of-religion home. School bully Lee Carter (Will Poulter), on the other hand, lives in a mansion next to a home for seniors where he often torments the old folks, much to the chagrin of the nurses who work there. Unlike Will's close-knit family unit, Lee's mother and stepfather live in Spain and rarely ever see Lee or his older brother Lawrence (played by Gossip Girl's impossibly handsome Ed Westwick). But when the isolated member of The Brethren meets up with the misunderstood bully, the two form a unique friendship as they struggle to make a Rambo-esque action film.

Lee's pirated version of Rambo: First Blood ends up being the first film that Will has ever seen. Will becomes so entranced by the film, that he ends up making up his own storyline, through a series of drawings, in which he is the son of Rambo out to save his father. Lee adopts Will's story and enlists his new friend on a journey of moviemaking.

As Will's involvement with making the film threatens his family's position within The Brethren, things get even more complicated when Will's popularity levels at school rise and more and more of his classmates find out about the little film that Lee had wanted kept quiet. Now other students want in on the movie fun, including French exchange student Didier Revol (Jules Sitruk), whom all the English boys try to emulate. Entering Will and Lee's film as a new character, "Ze Wolf," Didier's interesting acting abilities add unintended humor to the boys' film. With new actors and a larger crew working on Will and Lee's film, tempers rise and consequences become unavoidable.

Directed and written by Garth Jennings and produced by Nick Goldsmith, both men better known as Hammer & Tongs (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Son of Rambow captures all that was great, and a little strange, about the '80s from the neon fashion and poppy music to the obsession with films and popular culture in general. It's not just a film about little boys running around with fake weaponry. Featuring a cast of relatively fresh faces, Son of Rambow goes deeper to become a clever film about popularity, friendship, and imagination where not everything is as it seems.