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Arts \| Film

Rambo revisited

Nov 14 2008 06:00

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Flashbacks of a Fool
Between missions as 007, Daniel Craig elected to produce and act in this debut feature of his friend, commercials director Baillie Walsh. The result spins the tale of a washed-up movie star who is summoned home to attend the funeral of a childhood buddy. And what a curate's egg it turns out to be: a woozy rites-of-passage drama that seems one-part languorous to two-parts drunk, drifting sluggishly between sun-blasted present-day California and sun-blasted 1970s England.

It's like an awkward (and how could it not be awkward?) marriage of The Cement Garden and Beaches; an intriguing bit of driftwood, an exotic wreck. Matters wrap up with a bizarre scene in which our hero listens with frowning sadness to the story of a woman who was decapitated by a lorry and then had her head stolen by a passing fox. After which he shakes his head (so much strangeness in the world!), picks up his bag and prepares to return to Bond. -- Xan Brooks © Guardian

Son of Rambow
This amiable British film is about a few movie-struck kids, marooned in the bland 1980s suburbs, who set out to make their own amateur video sequel to Rambo. The good-natured support of Sylvester Stallone himself gave a muscular push to the film's marketing: we've had Bend It Like Beckham; this could be Grunt It Like Sly. There are some laughs, but the film doesn't fully earn our sentimental indulgence, and there is a persistent sort of Britfilm lameness, 2D characterisation and soft-focus comedy.

Bill Milner plays a shy little boy called Will who finds himself terrorised by the school tearaway Lee Carter (Will Poulter) into appearing as the stunt man in the action movie Lee is hoping to submit for a young person's filmmaking prize. Son of Rambow obviously has a different approach from Be Kind Rewind, also about quirky, home-made films. That was more obviously ironic and sophisticated. This is trying for something more real, but unlike Sly's fearsome knife, it doesn't have much of an edge. -- Peter Bradshaw © Guardian

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Rambo revisited

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