Lee (Will Poulter) is a sadistic young hell-raiser.
It's easy to see why Son of Rambow charmed festival audiences at Sundance. Funny, off-center, inventive, unexpectedly touching, the Brit movie written and directed by Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) plays like a combination of Tom Sawyer and Billy Elliott with a slice of Tim Burton. In fact, it's virtually impossible to dislike this '80s-era story about Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) -- a straight-arrow 10-year-old brought up in the stranglehold of a severe religious sect. His opposite number Lee Carter (Will Poulter) -- a sadistic young hell-raiser and social outcast -- recruits him to perform hilarious, sometimes death-defying stunts for the Stallone-inspired amateur backyard movie he is shooting with a boxy video camera. Then, there's a busload of French exchange students, led by a comically ultra-stylish, snooty ringleader Didier (Jules Sitruk), who arrive for the semester and get in on the filmmaking action, threatening to take over the whole shebang.
Lee and Will (Will Poulter and Bill Milner) star in their own backyard action flick.
There isn't much narrative drive, but along the way, there are punitive adult figures, slapstick, whimsy, melancholy and heaps of affectionate nostalgia for, of all things, the '80s. The movie really cooks because of the interplay between the wildly different loners played by Milner and Poulter, whose unforced charm and chemistry liven up every scene they're in, although Lee is sometimes written as such a despicable little bully that you ache for Will to put his lights out. Still, Son of Rambow is the best Rambo movie yet.
Photos: Maggie Ferreira/©2008 by Paramount Vantage, a division of Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.
