Director: Garth Jennings
Year Released: 2007
Rating: 2.0
Two unlikely friends from different families - one comes from a group of religious fanatics who think experience is to feared and the other from wealthy absentee parents who leave him with his older brother - decide to make a movie inspired by Sylvester Stallone's First Blood. The concept is cute and quaint but it makes a shift from comedy to drama and becomes stale; the most intriguing aspect is the high level of subliminal homoeroticism at play, as the boys uniformly reject the girls to fawn over an effeminate French exchange student (when the girls kiss him, he claims they're boring) and engage in macho role play (squeaky voiced Will plays Alpha Male Rambo Jr. while screeching for bad boy Lee Carter). Plus, director Jennings doesn't find the time to properly explore the topics here: friendship among the social classes, mocking warfare as 'child's play,' the problems with parental neglect (Lee Carter) and parental possessiveness (Will) and how in the hell Carter doesn't get expelled from school. Because sending a flying dog attached to a kite through a classroom window: that's a paddlin'.
