Son of Rambow
12A, nationwide
Son of Rambow is the tale of two young boys — one from a strict religious background; the other a troubled troublemaker — who come together to shoot a backyard version of Rambo: First Blood to enter it into the BBC’s Screen Test competition. It is a British film, set in some English suburb in the early Eighties, and it is chock-a-block with all the things that usually make films like this work very happily indeed: slapstick; fantasy; derring-do; friendship; getaways on bicycles and scrappy underdogs triumphing over horrid adults. It’s mostly a kids’ film, but it also has its eye on cinema-accompanying parents with oodles of Eighties nostalgia, including Space Dust, jump suits, Swing Ball, scented erasers and those first mobile phones the size of your head. So it has everything except …well …any real or convincing charm.
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