#89: The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007) August 30, 2010
Posted by badblokebob in : Fantasy, 2000s, adaptations, 2 stars, Adventure, British films, 2010 , add a comment
Harry Potter has a lot to answer for. By taking a successful children’s book and turning it into a billion-dollar film franchise, Warner Bros inadvertently suggested everyone else try the same with every kids’ book series they could get their hands on. The Chronicles of Narnia, The Golden Compass, Inkheart, Twilight — for better or worse, it’s all Potter’s fault.
And so, of course, is the awkwardly titled The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, allegedly based on Susan Cooper’s five-volume fantasy series, The Dark is Rising, and specifically the second novel, The Dark is Rising. Changes from book to screen abound, however, though I’m no authority to list them — I’ve only read the first book, and that was many years ago — but there’s no sign of an Arthurian influence or Cornish setting (things I’m informed the books are concerned with). In fact, it’s specifically set near London, because, of course, Britain is only London; and the lead character is changed to an ex-pat American, because, of course, Americans would never go to see a fantasy movie starring a British kid.
Fan-baiting changes aren’t the only things wrong with the film, though. For much of the first half I was almost considering a scene-by-scene account of the irritations and weaknesses, but that would mean watching it again. So, for a few of the problems: the dialogue is frequently clunky, either with stock fantasy phrasing or plain old implausible utterances; the acting is variable, in particular the irritating children, but even Christopher Eccleston fails to do much decent with his villain role; the story is ill thought out, with conflicting or logic-less motivations and a quest structure that requires no skill 
(the titular Seeker has to find six ’signs’ — i.e. little magic MacGuffins — a task which seems to involve waiting around until one falls into his hands, sometimes literally); Cunningham’s direction is over enthusiastic, throwing in jaunty angles and varied film speeds like it’s been outlawed to use a straight shot at 24 frames per second.
It’s also almost entirely devoid of humour, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but doesn’t exactly help. About the best joke is that the Rider’s primary disguise amongst regular folk is a doctor, and he’s played by Chris Eccleston, who had just been The Doctor.
And if I’m nitpicking, that poster is pretty thoroughly unrepresentative. The guy on the top left isn’t even in it (they cut a whole character, I presume that’s him), while the two flanking our hero at the bottom are also minor roles; and, anyway (spoilers!) are both bad guys. Sort of. A bit. Well, look, they’re not even close to being as much of a trio as that poster implies. At any point.
Yet for all that, it’s not all bad. The film is actually awash with great (or potentially great) moments, sequences and ideas. Considering how weak other parts are, it’s easy to assume the good bits must have occurred by accident, or be left-overs from the novel. 
Equally, as most occur in the film’s second half, the damage has already been done. They also don’t negate the fact that exciting or inventive action scenes don’t make up for a plot that leaves them bereft of character development, emotion, or truly genuine thrills.
If you’re a fan of the books, I imagine you already know to stay well clear. For the rest of us, The Dark is Rising might be worth a single watch for the sake of a handful of these appreciable scenes, but after suffering through the objectionable performances and pondering the unsatisfying storytelling, you’ll wish they’d found their way into a movie that was more deserving.
#84: Matchstick Men (2003) August 21, 2010
Posted by badblokebob in : Comedy, Drama, Thriller, Crime, 2000s, adaptations, 4 stars, 2010 , add a comment
Matchstick Men ends with a twist. One of those great big changes-everything-you’ve-just-seen numbers that have a habit of making a film notorious.
Yet I’m almost loathe to mention it, because I’ve never read a review, preview, summary or what-have-you of the film that mentions there’s a twist. Maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong pieces; maybe no one cares; maybe they’re all just playing along trying to keep it secret. But not me, because I bloody hated it.
The twist, that is. The rest of the film is pretty good, but the twist undermines it — and not just because I knew it was coming. I don’t wish to sound boastful, but I knew it was coming before I even started watching, guessed from the little I did know about the film from one or two reviews and (sort-of-spoiler warning!) that they’d cast a 24-year-old as a 14-year-old. I spent the whole film hoping that my predicted twist wouldn’t come to pass, but, with crushing inevitability, it did. I didn’t guess every element of it before I began, though I picked up most as the film went along, and those that I didn’t get weren’t surprising either.
Is it easily guessable? I don’t know. It was to me. Perhaps I’ve seen too many heist-type movies or TV shows (watching several seasons of Hustle covers that one easily), or perhaps just too many films with twists, or perhaps it’s just my writer’s brain at work — the latter does have a tendency to make many films guessable.
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because a guessable twist can still work. This one doesn’t.
Twists are fine. Twists can be great. As I said, you can guess a twist is coming and it can still work. A really good twist works even when you know for certain it’s coming; its existence raises what you’ve seen, makes it all work even on repeated viewings when the element of surprise is obviously gone. Matchstick Men doesn’t have that kind of twist. It has the kind of twist that undermines everything you’ve just seen. Not because it’s illogical — it isn’t in the slightest — but because it tramples over the film’s emotional resonance, in my opinion.
I don’t want to give away the twist here because, even if it’s a rubbish one, that’s a bit unfair on the film. I’d encourage you to watch it anyway and see what you think. And there are reasons to watch it anyway, even if some of the best ones are at least partially tossed away at the end.
Good things, then. The performances. Nic Cage can be awfully mannered and OTT quite often, but here it works. His character is inherently implausible — an obsessive-compulsive agoraphobe who’s also a con artist — but he plays it well, replete with tics and habits. It could easily be a caricature or spoof of the afflictions, and at times it threatens to tip the balance — 
when we see him obsessively cleaning to a jaunty “isn’t this funny” score, for instance — but the line is successfully trod most of the time.
Alison Lohman is also exceptionally good as a 14-year-old girl. It took a scene or two to convince me, but after that I was plenty on board with it. It occasionally takes some effort to remind yourself she was 24. As the third lead, Sam Rockwell plays a typical Sam Rockwell part. He does it very well, naturally, and there’s nothing to fault him on, but he’s been better elsewhere. The rest of the cast are absolutely fine but not exactly called on much — this is Cage’s film, and to a lesser extent Lohman’s. They have the emotional journey, the film’s heart-and-soul around its long(-ish) con ‘plot’ (which could just be lifted from any episode of Hustle… except it’s not even that complex).
It’s also, as you may have noticed, A Ridley Scott Film. It doesn’t feel like one. It has a ’00s-US-indie aesthetic in every regard and consequently feels like the work of a first-or-second-time young-ish director. Perhaps this is to Scott’s credit, but on the downside it lacks any distinctive qualities. I suppose it’s not fully at odds with the rest of his career — even when you try to pick a genre Scott’s known for, you often find only two or three examples of it in his CV; and there are several genres you can do it with — but if you hadn’t told me it was a Ridley Scott film I’d never have guessed, and I’d wager no one else would either.
Matchstick Men was a lot better than I’d expected, because most of the coverage I remember shoved it aside as a middle-of-the-road side project for Scott.
It’s definitely better than that, if still not the “sweep the Oscars” success Ebert seems to think. But I wish they’d stuck with the decision to cut out the twist, not because I object to how it leaves our hero (which was the reasoning, apparently), but because it undercuts an awful lot of what’s good in the film and consequently left a bad taste in my mouth, all for the sake of some aren’t-we-clever-ness.
Stop the film about when Roy wakes up in a hospital bed. Imagine they got away with it and he went to live happily with his daughter. It’s not just a nicer ending, it’s a more whole one too. And then imagine that film on my end-of-year Top 10, because this one won’t be.
#39: Kick-Ass (2010) August 3, 2010
Posted by badblokebob in : Comedy, Action, Thriller, Crime, 5 stars, adaptations, British films, superhero films, 2010, 2010s , 2 comments
If you happen to remember my (first) Watchmen review, you may recall that I asserted the following:
Zack Snyder’s Watchmen Film is not “the big screen equivalent of Alan Moore’s Watchmen” — that would be a movie, likely very different to the graphic novel, that examined and deconstructed representations of superheroes in cinema and television.
To cut to the chase, Kick-Ass is that film. Yes, it’s still adapted from a pre-existing comic book text, and it doesn’t “examine and deconstruct” quite as methodically — or, if you prefer, “as coldy” — as both Moore and Snyder did; but it still takes its cues as much, if not more, from fellow superhero films and TV series than directly from comics. Much as Watchmen offered variations of specific characters and situations in comics, so too does Kick-Ass from their film counterparts: Kick-Ass himself has the whole “awkward teenage experience” thing of Spider-Man, but fully updated to the era of Internet social networking (even if it’s a behind-the-times use of MySpace over Facebook or twitter); while Big Daddy is a clear Batman analogy, with elements of The Punisher thrown in for good measure.
Elements and moments in this vein permeate the film: Nic Cage employing an Adam West Batman voice for Big Daddy; the black eyeliner 
required to complete his mask; the Spider-Man plot structure (particularly early on) and numerous references (the opening voiceover, or when Kick-Ass considers jumping rooftops); the “chicks dig the car”-esque scenes with Red Mist — the list goes on, other sequences spoofing whole genre clichés (the “first night on the job”, for example) as well as such specific films.
The score is similarly perfect, mixing serious action queues with appropriately-placed fun songs (mainly during Hit Girl’s action sprees) and more knowing nods to other films — listen out for almost-note-perfect riffs on the famous Superman theme and Danny Elfman’s Batman work.
And, again like Watchmen, Kick-Ass takes all these familiar elements and clichés and attempts to place them in ‘the real world’ (though its real world is far closer to, um, the real real world than Watchmen’s alternate history). What this means, practically, is that Kick-Ass gets his ass-kicked. Badly. And that his enemies aren’t cackling megalomaniacs who leave handy riddles around or plot to pollute the water supply, but everyday muggers and, at worst, crime kingpins.
This, I suppose, could be seen as where it takes on Batman Begins; signs seem to suggest Kick-Ass 2 may follow The Dark Knight’s theory of supervillains following the superhero into existence.
But, to go back on myself, the most striking point here is the ass-kicking. Violence is bloody, brutal and realistic. Well, the actions themselves are all action movie choreography, but the results are realistic — bloody and brutally so. Kick-Ass gets broken his first time out… which, fortunately, and fully in-keeping with the superhero-origins story, leaves him with a half-metal skeleton and the ability to feel no pain. “Cool,” as he probably says.
This example characterises the film’s attempts to have its cake and eat it. While it does the whole “being a superhero would be a nightmare” thing early on, we then meet Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, who are unfeasible pros, and Kick-Ass himself improves too. It gets to criticise the unlikelihood of the premise and the extremity of the violence, before latter revelling in it itself. On the other hand, it’s so much fun that maybe this doesn’t matter — director Matthew Vaughn certainly knows his way round an action sequence, 
and the humour keeps rolling too — so the (arguably) topsy-turvy themes of the tale ultimately serve as a “downbeat good-for-nothing makes good” story arc.
Not that the mass of negative reviews seem to notice this anyway — they’re too busy being outraged at the swearing uttered by and violence enacted on a young girl. I speak, of course, of the likes of Christopher Tookey (don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him — he writes in the Daily Mail) and Roger Ebert, both of whom lambasted the film for its moral vacuity. They’re not the only ones, just some of the most high-profile (on the other side of the fence, plenty of reviews didn’t miss the point, but they’re less interesting at the moment). Is it low to suggest Ebert & co too old to ‘get’ Kick-Ass? Probably; especially as some of the other critics who hated it are suitably young. But I don’t think it’s wrong to suggest that not all their arguments hold weight; that some of their reactions were too simplistic.
Reviews like the Daily Mail’s would have us believe the film is all about the glorification of extreme violence and sexualisation of 11-year-old girls. Some have read this as Tookey being a paedophile — how else would he spot something others didn’t, unless he were aroused by it himself? 
Tookey, naturally, denies such things (he’s posted a long whiney “I’m being Internet bullied!” article online, trying to lump himself in with those unfortunate souls who’ve suffered the emotional consequences of genuine Internet bullying). I fall between the two camps on this one — that is to say, Tookey’s probably not a paedophile, but nor does the film set out to entice them. Vaughn said he cast Hit-Girl young to avoid sexualising her; if he’d cast a more physically developed 15-year-old, she would’ve been more suspect.
If anything, the film works to confront its audience with notions like this. Is Hit-Girl sexy? She’s 11, you perv! Is getting into fights fun? Not when you get the crap kicked out of you! Is being captured by the enemy, ready to be unmasked on the Internet, just a chance for a cool escape? Not when you get burnt alive. Slowly. Is this highly-trained uber-assassin the Coolest Killer Ever? Not when a grown man is beating up a little girl. Vaughn & co (by which I mean original author Mark Miller and co-screenwriter Jane Goldman) start from a place of “this doesn’t work” (having their cake), then they do make it cool (eating it), but then they tear it back down again (I can’t think of a pleasant analogy now).
But, unlike their characters, they don’t tear it down with a baseball bat around the audiences’ head; by which I mean, they don’t spell it out in big idiot-friendly letters — “do you see why this is wrong? Do you see? Let me tell you again…” Instead, they let what occurs speak for itself. OK, the good guys do win in the end, and in a rather cool way — but would it be a more complete moral message if the grown man killed the little girl; if the hero got blown up by the bazooka? Perhaps it would; I don’t know; personally, I like it the way it is.
Am I saying experienced, respected critics like Ebert and Tookey (well, he’s experienced) are too thick to see subtext that I’ve noticed? For once, I suppose I am (though I certainly don’t claim to be alone in noticing it). Am I treating the filmmakers with more intelligence than they deserve? I don’t think so; I think Ebert, Tookey & co have assumed they’re dumber than they are, and in the process made themselves look a bit dimmer. I think they’ve been blinded by the comic-booky roots (their defence, “but I’ve liked some comic book films!”, is beside the point), the extreme situations the film presents
— and there’s no doubt that the violence and swearing from such young characters are deliberately extreme and provocative (but for a reason) — and the potential for audiences to misread the whole thing as “just cool”, and so have misread it themselves, as “just perverse”. I think that does the film a disservice.
My initial reaction — besides “wow this is a fun watch!” — was that Kick-Ass walks a tightrope between its initial “what if someone really tried to be a superhero?” premise and the visceral pleasures of taking it to the level of “what if someone succeeded at being a superhero?” But the more I consider it, the more I think this is part of the point — it never, really, goes fully ‘right’. As I’ve said, the good guys win and the bad guys lose, but there are casualties and hard-fought battles along the way. Yes, it thoroughly abandons its “this is the real world” premise by the final act, but the film as a whole leads you there step by step. Is this a flaw, or sneaky filmmaking pulling (or attempting to pull) the wool over our eyes? Does it matter?
It’s an ideological minefield, that’s for sure, and perhaps some would rather it more blatantly faced up to this than it does. Others would clearly rather it didn’t ever raise such issues. Has it dodged them, or has it left them for the audience to consider? I think it’s clear I believe the latter; that most of the negative reviews are too busy being angry to notice they were made to think (or were meant to); sadly, some viewers will be too busy thinking “woah, cool” to have thought at all, which just vindicates those naysayers in their own mind. This latter group are clearly the ones the critics are worried about, 
but why should every film cater to the lowest common denominator of intellectual ability, or be wary that every viewer might be a paedophile or violent psycho?
And even leaving all that aside, even treating it as “just a comic book movie”, Kick-Ass has something significant to offer. By using various other superhero movies and TV series as its starting point, but grounding them in (a version of) the real world — with attendant debates about violence etc — Kick-Ass fills a void in need of filling — by which I mean: as Watchmen was to superhero comics, so Kick-Ass is to superhero films.
Kick-Ass is released on DVD & Blu-ray in the US today, and in the UK on 6th September.
#64: Mulan (1998) July 28, 2010
Posted by badblokebob in : Animation, Disney, War, adaptations, 4 stars, 1990s, Adventure, Historical, 2010 , add a comment
I realised recently that I haven’t seen an animated Disney film produced after The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which I saw on rented video thinking I was probably getting too old for Disney. Now I’ve grown up, of course, I know you’re never too old for a good Disney. As Mulan seems to be one of the last Disneys to gather significant praise before they slipped into their ’00s rut, it seemed a good place to begin caching up on what I’d missed.
It’s easy to see what critics and/or audiences liked about Mulan. There’s a few good, catchy songs — though sadly no villain’s song, which is usually one of the highlights — and some lovely animation — though I feel it’s been rather outshone by the similarly-styled Kung Fu Panda in this regard. There are decent action sequences too, fast-paced and fluidly animated, which helps make what could’ve been a Girly Film into something palatable to both genders (I remember being distinctly unimpressed with Pocahontas when forced to see it in the cinema).
The other thing that stands out about Mulan, particularly now, is how very Americanised it is. That’s nothing new for Disney, of course, but it feels a little odd these days. When we’re so used to increased attempts at appropriate cultural reverence from Hollywood movies, it’s almost uncomfortable to hear such American accents from clearly Chinese characters. 
(It’s this kind of thing that has caused uproar for The Last Airbender in the US (quite aside from it supposedly being a load of cobblers). How times change.) Eddie Murphy’s Mushu (who now comes across a little like a proto-Donkey) is particularly incongruous in this regard. I suppose it’s no worse than, say, Aladdin, or The Jungle Book, or all the Euro-set films.
With a ‘princess’ overcoming her assigned place, a pair of cute/humorous animal sidekicks, a princely husband-to-be, and a vicious villain in need of defeating, the tale of Mulan has certainly been adapted into the Disney mould. It may not be their best effort, but it’s still a strong one.
#57: Max Payne: Harder Cut (2008) July 17, 2010
Posted by badblokebob in : Action, Thriller, Crime, 2000s, adaptations, 1 star, video game films, alternate & director's cuts, 2010, Film Noir: Pre/Post/Neo/etc. , add a comment
I was a bit of a gamer once. Not an especially hardcore one, but certainly a gamer. And I remember Max Payne, and I remember enjoying it, and I remember thinking it would make quite a good film, and I remember one of the biggest problems being that what made it so unique as a game was the bullet-time feature and what would make it so derivative as a film would be to use bullet-time. But it also had lots of other things going for it: the snow-bound nighttime New York setting, the dark revenge plot, the hard-boiled gravel-toned voiceover.
Luckily, director John Moore doesn’t use Matrix-derived bullet-time visuals, but, despite keeping a snow-bound New York and a revenge plot, he’s somehow managed to also throw out everything that made Max Payne: The Game good. Despite the similarities in plot and setting, this doesn’t feel at all like the game.
Max Payne: The Film, to put it simply, is a load of crap.
I’ll just reel off the bad points:
For something advertised as an action movie — at best, an action-thriller — there’s barely any action. Even the climax, where you might expect a fair bit, is virtually devoid of it. Moore exploits extreme slow motion to stand in for the game’s Matrix-esque combat. Unfortunately, he seems to be under the illusion that a couple of barely-moving slow-mo moments also stand in for a full action sequence.
When an action movie can’t deliver any action, there’s a problem.
Instead, the budget seems to have been spent on some angel/demon CGI rubbish. Early on, one begins to wonder if the film’s headed toward Constantine-esque fantasy territory — it’s not in the game, but hey, that’s never bothered Uwe Boll. Eventually it becomes clear it isn’t, these are just some kind of junkie visions. At least, I’m sure they’re meant to be, but I’m not sure the film ever makes that explicit — I wouldn’t blame a casual viewer going away with the sense that these angel/demon/things are actually meant to be there and only the junkies can see them. Which would be just as irrelevant.
Despite this being the “Harder Cut”, it comes across as a PG-13 film playing at being an R. (Though the extended cut was released as ‘unrated’ in the US, the original MPAA rating was an R before a handful of changes needed to get it down to the more bankable PG-13.) It’s now around three minutes longer than the theatrical cut, but from what I can gather a significant chunk of that seems to be made up of people walking around longer. The ‘harder’ bit merely comes from a couple of frames (literally) of violence and the odd bit of CG blood.
Presumably the extra walking around is to artificially lengthen the running time and persuade the more gullible that they’re getting a tougher experience.
Mark Wahlberg has all the charisma and emotion of a wooden plank. No one else in the cast can offer anything better, least of all a mis-cast Mila Kunis. In fairness, it’s not like any of them are given proper characters to work with: most display no kind of arc, and even those that have one — Kunis, for example — are ultimately ignored, the events that might affect them on an emotional level serving only to further what stands in for a plot. Only Max himself is allowed any genuine emotional connection. And by “genuine” I mean some supporting characters we never see again tell us it’s had a real impact on him. Wahlberg certainly doesn’t convey it.
Olga Kurylenko is also in this film. She tries to sleep with the hero and fails,
as per usual.
At least some of it looks quite nice. The drifting snow-laden exterior shots are among the few bits of the film that might genuinely be considered good. But when you can get pretty images elsewhere, why suffer through this?
A short post-credits scene suggests a sequel. Why is this buried after the credits? Presumably so as the filmmakers didn’t embarrass themselves more widely by implying they thought this pathetic effort might earn itself a follow-up.
Uwe Boll wanted to get his hands on Max Payne. At times while watching this, I wished he had. You can’t get much more damning than that. Other than, maybe, something witty, like — “maximum pain is certainly what this film will cause you”.
#28: Clue (1985) July 3, 2010
Posted by badblokebob in : Comedy, Crime, adaptations, 4 stars, 1980s, Mystery, 2010 , add a comment
Although Disney have recently treated (I use the word loosely) us to a glut of films based on theme park attractions, movies adapted from good old board games seem a lot rarer. This is probably for good reason — even more so than Disney rides, the majority have no kind of usable narrative. Cluedo (aka Clue in the US) is one of the few that does, and consequently is one of the few (only?) board games that has reached the silver screen. So far, anyway.
I’m going to put Clue into the same category as Flash Gordon: it’s the kind of film that’s unremittingly daft, but it knows it is, and if one gets on board with that then it’s a very enjoyable experience. The story sees an exuberantly excellent Tim Curry gather a group of disparate-but-secretly-connected individuals at a remote stately home, each under a fake name based on those infamous monikers from the game. Eventually there’s a murder, and then a few more, all of which is conveyed in a mix of hilarious farce and fast-paced screwball comedy. It’s Agatha Christie meets Fawlty Towers.
It’s not all funny, certainly — there’s a fair share of puerile gags — but the abundant good bits more than make up for them. On the other hand, you may agree with Roger Ebert that most of the gags fail to hit home. That it has a cult following — plus frequent airings on digital channels like ITV3 suggesting it might pull relatively decent viewing figures 
(all things considered) whenever it’s on — goes to show it’s all a matter of taste.
Other than the board game connection, Clue is best known for its three different endings — all of which were released, with each screening having just one attached. On TV the film shows with all three consecutively, and they perhaps work best this way — there’s a rising scale of ridiculousness, and the varied repetition of a couple of gags underlines rather than steals their amusement value. My personal favourite variant was the first, incidentally.
Surely the only reasonable reaction to a task as ludicrous as adapting a board game into a film is to turn it into a comedy. Clue does so with aplomb. Ridley Scott, take note.
Clue is on ITV3 tomorrow, Sunday 4th, at 9pm.
#44: First Blood (1982) June 24, 2010
Posted by badblokebob in : Action, Drama, Thriller, adaptations, 4 stars, 1980s, Adventure, 2010 , 1 comment so far
Ah, Rambo. Rambo Rambo Rambo. The only Rambo film I’ve seen is Son of Rambow. And, it turns out, the only Sylvester Stallone film I’ve seen is Judge Dredd. (He had an uncredited cameo in Men in Black, apparently, but I don’t think that counts.) Quite how this has happened (or, rather, hasn’t happened) I don’t know. Anyway, with the Rambo series apparently over, it’s as good a time as any to begin catching up.
“Rambo” has become a byword for violent excess. But, as many film fans know, the first film has marginally nobler aims: here, the not-yet-titular hero is a Vietnam vet dealing with a mixture of PTSD, unresolved service issues, and poor treatment from the ‘folks back home’. Taken in by an unreasonable police department, he finally snaps… Is it realistic that he then wages a one-man war against a small town? Actually, to an extent, it is; certainly more so than what he gets up to in the sequels (from what I’ve read). If you want to try to claim it’s totally real reality, of course that’s stretching credibility; but as action movies go, it errs on the more plausible side.
What this the setup creates — aside from an excuse for shoot-outs and explosions — is an interesting dichotomy. Rambo is clearly the hero — the police department out to get him is full of abusive good-for-nothings — but there are whole sequences where the camera, and so the audience, is placed with the bad guys, wondering where Rambo’s lurking, what he’s planning, what his next move will be. It’s like a horror movie, only the stalker is the good guy. But (thanks to Stallone’s intervention, reportedly) the film’s never in any doubt of misplacing our sympathies: Rambo has been mistreated and is more or less in the right; he needs help, not execution.
Stallone is perfect for the character: suitably calm and ‘everyman’ at the beginning; muscular and mostly silent as the trained assassin; and even an actor capable of pulling off the final breakdown, when the horrors of war spill over. It’s difficult to imagine most muscle-men action stars pulling off Rambo’s closing speech. Throughout, Rambo’s PTSD is made obvious without being overdone: brief flashbacks suggest all the horror we need to know, topped by his final outburst. Rambo isn’t the beast, the men who made him that way are, along with those he did it for who fail to appreciate what he’s been through.
And if psychological insight isn’t your thing, don’t worry, there’s not too much of it, and there’s plenty of action and a couple of nice big explosions to keep you happy.
First Blood is on ITV4 tomorrow, Friday 25th, at 10:30pm.