The film revolves around the 1980s, when schoolchildren met Will Broadfoot (Bill Milner) and Lee Carter (Will Poulter) by chance. In an English summer season, there appears to be a strange path as two students from different backgrounds set out to produce a movie based on First Blood.
With apologies to Mr. Stallone, no one would ever argue First Blood was an essential part of any healthy childhood. But the ability to make-believe certainly is.
We cringe and laugh at -- and are ultimately moved by -- their clumsiness and innocence. And it endears us to the Rambo films in ways we never could have anticipated.
After the movie, I imagined its writer-director, Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) being more than a little like Will, and the movie uncannily similar to one of Will's comic epics.
Son of Rambow is an inventive and amusing coming-of-age movie that deftly entwines elements of farce and fantasy, rebelliousness and sentiment, while paying seriously funny tribute to the transcendent power of art.
These two boys have, along with writer-director Garth Jennings, turned a coming-of-age story into a treatise on both the fragility of artistic vision and the danger of popular opinion.
Jennings is clearly having a wonderful time recreating the fantasies of his youth, but sometimes his perspective get a little too inbred, and the picture suffers for it.
