Paramount Vantage Photo

How She Move: Like a Jamaican.

* 1/2 Rambo
Directed by Sylvester Stallone. Written by Art Monterastelli and Sylvester Stallone. With Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze, Graham McTavish and Ken Howard. (R)

You've got to hand it to Sylvester Stallone. When he was looking for a lesser-known war-torn country in need of Rambo's intervention, the first call he made was to Soldier of Fortune magazine. His second call was to the United Nations. That, in a nutshell, says it all about Rambo, the fourth installment in the series that does for the Burmese civil war (a conflict as old as Stallone himself) what Rambo: First Blood Part II did for American MIAs and Rambo III did for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That is to say, not very much.

It's been 20 years since we left John Rambo, and it turns out he's been living a reclusive life in Thailand, procuring poisonous snakes for shows and fish for displaced Buddhist monks as he navigates the river on a humble longboat. When a group of missionaries from Colorado try to hire him to ferry them to Burma to deliver medical supplies, the ever-articulate Rambo replies "Fuck the world," and then takes them anyway. After he's dropped the missionaries off they're captured by the Burmese Army. Soon Rambo is ferrying an international crew of mercenaries back to Burma to rescue them. Guess who else is going to need rescuing?

The cathartic pleasures of the one-man-army genre can't be overstated, whether it's Rambo or Die Hard's John McClane or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Rambo's backstory as a Green Beret killing machine adds that Jason Bourne?black ops mystique. (If you find yourself missing the late Richard Crenna, clips from the previous installments appear in a hilarious black-and-white dream sequence—in case you were wondering where Rambo stood on the color vs. black-and-white question.)

To compensate for Stallone's impassive countenance, there's his ponderous, echoing voiceover as Rambo forges a new machete: "War is in your blood. Don't fight it. You didn't kill for your country; you killed for yourself." And boy, does he ever. There haven't been this many arrows through heads since Steve Martin retired his stand-up routine, although the preferred method of slaughter is decapitation. Unexpectedly, the film has been given a pleasingly overexposed look so that the blood really pops. And squirts. And gushes.

Turning a genocidal crisis into a knock-'em-down video game, Rambo is shamelessly opportunistic and yet undeniably entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. Sadly, our hero does not bring the civil war to an end; he merely rescues the Westerners. The movie's finale brings the Rambo series full circle, giving it a fitting ending. Or maybe not. All that human growth hormone can't keep a boy on the farm for long. Maybe next time Rambo can help Don Cheadle take on Darfur.

*

** 1/2 How She Move
Directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid. Written by Annmarie Morais. With Rutina Wesley, Tre Armstrong and Dwain Murphy. (PG-13)

No competitive-dance-movie cliché is left unstomped in How She Move, a Canadian foray into a genre that has brought us everything from You Got Served to Bring It On. Raya (Rutina Wesley) is a brainy teenager in the projects who leaves her prep school when her older sister ODs. She returns to her gritty urban high school, where the math teacher gets her kicks by holding a quadratic equation competition, and pitting the smartest student against an 18-year-old who has failed math twice. The teacher won't let Raya play dumb, so pretty soon she and her adversary, Michelle (Tre Armstrong), are having a dance-off in the auto shop.

But that's OK, because in films like this the bad girl always turns out to be the best friend you could ever have. Impressed with Raya's skills, Michelle offers her a spot on her step-dancing crew, but Raya has her eyes on the $50,000 prize at the upcoming Step Monster competition in Detroit, which women's teams never win. So she joins the Jane Street Junta, led by potential love-interest Bishop (Dwain Murphy), gets thrown off the team for freestyling, and then makes the highly unlikely decision to join the crew run by her sister's drug-dealing ex-boyfriend. It all works out in the end, but you knew that.

You also know that an R&B starlet (Keyshia Cole) will be MCing the big show, one team will steal the other's steps, and that the fictional teams will rely on stunts while real stepping teams will show how it's done (and actually do some stepping). You know that Raya's mother (Melanie Nicholls-King) will not approve but Raya will dance anyway, and her mother will appear at the final showdown beaming with pride in a scene as old as The Jazz Singer.

What How She Move brings to the genre is its uniquely Jamaican flavor (one women's step team performs in hospital scrubs), a glowing, sepia light (although the shots are sometimes oddly framed and clumsily edited) and a unisex movement vocabulary that allows Raya the freedom to dance like a person, not a girl. How She Move is also inarguably the first dance movie in which one character puts down another for reading Daphne DuMaurier. And the dance sequences would scare the ball gown off The Second Mrs. de Winter.

*

*** The Life of Reilly
Directed by Barry Poltermann and Frank Anderson; directed for the stage by Paul Linke. Written for the stage by Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Linke. (NR)

Charles Nelson Reilly, who passed away last spring, finally gets his due in The Life of Reilly, a film of his autobiographical one-man show taped over two performances in a North Hollywood theater in 2004. For those of us who remember the comedian from his appearances on Match Game wearing a captain's hat and an ascot—or from Lidsville or a very special X-Files or as Jesus in a Dead Milkmen song—the show is a revelation. Stooped and balding, wearing a baggy green shirt with an AIDS ribbon pinned to it, Reilly is a frail shadow of the mugging comic memorably parodied by Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live. Even his glasses are smaller.

Reilly, the only child of a domineering, bigoted nurse and a poster artist for Paramount, begins the show by telling the story of a childhood in the Bronx and Hartford with more than its share of dysfunction and tragedy. "Eugene O'Neill would never even get near this family!" he exclaims, and he's not kidding. Even a trip to the circus ends badly. In 1950 he moved to New York to be an actor, studying with Ute Hagen in a class full of future stars. Off-Broadway was just getting started—he did 22 shows in one year—and he was soon understudying both Paul Lynde and Dick Van Dyke in Bye Bye Birdie. After acclaimed supporting roles in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Hello Dolly, he went to Hollywood for the sitcom The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, where his success trumped an earlier pronouncement by an NBC executive that "They don't let queers on television." He later went to Florida, where he taught acting in a theater given to him by his friend Burt Reynolds.

It's a shame the film of these performances isn't better. Perhaps afraid of boring a young audience, the show was filmed with hyperactive handheld cameras (cut with dull wide shots from the back of the theater) and scored with distracting music at dramatic moments, mixed so low you wonder why they bothered. The Life of Reilly begins with man-on-the-street interviews in which people are asked "Do you remember Charles Nelson Reilly?" and jarringly returns to these interviews as a sort of intermission halfway through the film. Still, this is a valuable record of a performance by an iconic entertainer in twilight. "Save it for the stage!" his mother would say when he had something to tell her. And he did.

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