STUDIO: Paramount Vantage
RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2008
STARRING: Bill Milner, Will Poulter, and Jules Sitruk
WRITTEN BY: Garth Jennings
DIRECTED BY: Garth Jennings
GENRE: Comedy
RATING: PG-13

Creativity builds community. Whether it's a book club, theatre group, or a bunch of reckless children making a movie, it's amazing what an artistic endeavor can do to bring people together. Two people that know a lot about the unifying power of creativity are writer/director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, more commonly known as Hammer & Tongs. This team brought together several of the best bands of the last decade - R.E.M., Blur, Pulp, Vampire Weekend - with incredibly creative visions in their music videos and they brought an unusual-but-great casting choice like Mos Def to the world of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Whatever problems that movie may have had, it didn't feel like a product of the studio machine. They seem unconcerned with commonly held "rules" like "the band needs to be in the video" and you couldn't call Hitchhiker's a "traditional" sci-fi movie. For most of its running time, their latest film, Son of Rambow, fits into that rebellious perspective and feels like an ode to the rule-breaking days of childhood and how greatly they can be influenced by the power of movies. But, in one of the most tragic twists, the final act succumbs to the manipulative cliches that Hammer & Tongs felt like they had always fought against.

Son of Rambow stars the very good newcomers Bill Milner and Will Poulter as Will Proudfoot and Lee Carter, respectively. These two kids are at that age when climbing trees and blowing things up are still more intriguing than girls or, really, anything at all. But poor Will is stuck in an ultra-religious family where he's not allowed a lot of freedom. The first and only movie that Will ends up seeing is First Blood and it warps his fragile little mind, so much so that he teams with the local bully Lee to make their own movie, "Son of Rambow". The two are outcasts for completely different reasons, one because he's too poor and nice and one because he's too rich and mean. Some of the best artistic ventures have come from the most unusual combinations. Rather quickly, Lee and Will become two of the most popular kids in school. In a town where there's not much to do, everyone wants to be involved in their movie and a community of creativity builds around these two outcast children.

When Son of Rambow focuses on the power of cinema to inspire other people to create visions of their own, it totally works. I believe that there are kids out there right now seeing an action movie like First Blood for the first time and getting fired up to make a shoot-em-up of their own. But near the end of Son of Rambow, Jennings pushes the story too far and it breaks. Without giving anything away, there's an action scene with real life-and-death stakes and a movie that has felt light-on-its-feet crashes to the ground. To be blunt, I just didn't buy it. And once the air is let out of the tires of Rambow, the entire message of the movie collapses. The final act feels like a cheat, turning a movie that was about creativity into a story of best friends that the rest of the screenplay just doesn't adequately set up. Like a lot of those home movies we made as children, Son of Rambow has the best of intentions and a great set-up, but the ending falls apart.