ON CIRCUIT: I Could Never Be Your Woman, Sylvester Stallone in John Rambo and Starter for Ten.
I Could Never Be Your Woman
Michelle Pfeiffer plays Rosie, a 40-year-old single mother who works as a producer on a teenage TV drama. Thus she often relies on her daughter, Lizzie, to keep up with the teenage lingo. Rosie falls in love with a guy almost 10 years her junior and tries to ignore Tracey Ullman as Mother Nature, a fantasy figure who periodically appears to warn Rosie about needing to come to terms with ageing. A slightly over-the-top romantic comedy with little wit. — Nosimilo Ndlovu
John Rambo
Does the world need another Rambo outing right now? More specifically, does Burma? Sylvester Stallone’s one-man army was last seen aiding the mujahedeen in 1980s Afghanistan (and look how well that panned out). Now he’s back for one last hurrah, lending his nuanced brand of gunboat diplomacy to the ongoing conflict between the Burmese military and the Karen ethnic minority, laying waste to half of Myanmar in the process. Lucky they didn’t send him to Iraq or things might have turned really hairy.
The film’s first half comprises an arm-twisting justification for the carnage that follows. Soldiers storm a tranquil Karen village, shoot the children, rape the women and capture a bunch of peaceable American missionaries. That’s bad. So Rambo fires up his jalopy and chugs upriver on a mission of reprisal. That’s good. Before you know it, even the head missionary is getting in on the act, exuberantly bashing the brains out of a fallen marauder while our hero provides murderous support from atop a truck-mounted machine gun. More than 230 people are slaughtered during the course of John Rambo‘s svelte 91-minute running time, which surely sets a record for time-and-motion efficiency. They are shot and they are speared. They are throttled, bombed and disembowelled.
At times there is something weirdly comforting about the film’s no-frills fundamentalist zeal, its blinkered view of a world split between evil monsters and imperilled saints. It’s almost enough to make you forget its risible characters and its bone-headed grasp of geopolitics. What it can’t quite do is gloss over the preposterous centre-stage presence of its 61-year-old star. Resplendent in a natty bandana, with his jet-black locks cascading around a suspiciously stretched and immobile face, Stallone so resembles his mother that one starts to wonder whether she’s been drafted in as a body double for some of the more gruelling set pieces — perhaps the scene in which Rambo is shown tearing out a rapist’s throat with his bare hands. Was that a glint of jewellery on those foraging fingers? A gleam of polish on those manicured nails? Full marks to the editor for cutting away before we can tell for certain. — Xan Brooks