DON'T PUSH MEEEEE!!!!!!!

It beggars belief that this won the Best Picture Oscar instead of, for example, "Taxi Driver" but it's still a good, old-fashioned movie.

This was something of a comeback for Stallone, and it remains one of the last things he made worth seeing. Of course, on the one hand it's very silly and formulaic: one-time friends with a grudge reunite to battle a common enemy; hero, haunted with guilt, has a chance of redemption, etc, etc. It is, however, well done and highly entertaining. Most of the mountainous terrain cliches are covered (Avalanche? Check. Rope bridge scene? Check. Death by stalactite?!?!? Check.) and, if some of the sets look a little too much like sets, the pre-CGI-saturated charm is still potent.

It won't change your life but it might keep the kids quiet for a couple of hours.

The first half of this is fairly decent, as Stallone's disturbed Vietnam vet, tipped over the edge by the bigotry of a small-town Sheriff's Department, takes to the woods and uses his Green Beret training to pick off his persecutors, one by one. Though never exactly plausible, "First Blood" doesn't become detrimentally ludicrous until the National Guard starts firing rockets at him, and Rambo starts blowing up petrol stations for purely aesthetic purposes. Brian Dennehy is on top form as the bad guy, and Stallone delivers one of his best performances. His final breakdown is genuinely moving, even though I only caught about one word in five of what he was saying. Better than William Friedkin's "The Hunted"; not a patch on Walter Hill's "Southern Comfort".

I've got a soft spot for Stallone because, an actor/writer/director of reasonable artistic ambition at one time, he seems, like so many of us, to have got stuck doing a job he despises: the reluctant action hero, doomed never to be taken seriously by critics or audiences alike. And he's not quite the appalling actor he's forever maligned as being, either; he may not have won that Oscar he was nominated for with "Rocky" in 1976, but then neither did De Niro, as Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver", and how good was he?

"Daylight" is a reasonably entertaining disaster movie, spoiled by rotten dialogue, predictability and the cheesily developed team-building of its conveniently disparate group of unfortunates. Stallone plays his usual washed-up hero with a guilty conscience, looking for the road to redemption. Viggo Mortensen is fun as a narcissistic action-man, but he isn't around for very long. At times, it feels less like watching a movie and more like watching someone else play a computer game, in which successive perilous challenges must be overcome, against the clock, to progress to the next level. So-so.

Unlike the best Roger Corman-sponsored productions -- Jonathan Demme's "Caged Heat", for instance -- "Death Race 2000" never really rises above its transparently exploitative violence and female nudity. As others have said, it's just like watching "Wacky Races", the only differences being that a) some of the booby traps work in "Death Race 2000" and b) I can't recall Penelope Pitstop ever getting her funbags out (though that's an episode I'd very much like to see!) The movie is technically shoddy and not as entertaining as it should be, not because the humour is too tasteless to laugh at -- if anything, it could have been a bit sicker, for me -- it just isn't very funny. Stallone tries hard to wring a few laughs out of an underwritten rôle in a poor script, but David Carradine is very dull indeed. Disappointing. I did chuckle at the Euthanasia Day bit though.

Except for Rob Schneider, whose wise-cracking coward is reminiscent of one of those irritating sidekicks you get in animated movies, this has a far better cast than it deserves: Diane Lane, Max von Sydow, Armand Assante, Jurgen Prochnow, Joan Chen... It begins well enough, with a jokey tone similar to that of "Total Recall" and a surprisingly droll performance from Stallone, clearly enjoying himself immensely as the eponymous lawman. However, once a frame-up puts paid to Dredd dispensing 'justice' with a quip, the film becomes indistinguishable from the legion of other Sly movies in which he is pitted against a deadly foe and a mountain of adversity. In the film's favour, it is colourful and it looks terrific, achieving a closer approximation to a graphic novel made real than many, otherwise superior, comic book adaptations. To name just a few points of reference, bits and pieces ought to remind you of "Blade Runner" (grotty cyberpunk stylisation), "Robocop" (an ED-209-ish robot), perhaps even "The Hills Have Eyes" (a mutant cannibal family).

The highest compliment I can pay "Rambo III" is to say that it's no worse than "Rambo: First Blood, Part II". In fact, it's slightly better. Rambo is now a recreational stick-fighter and the janitor of a Buddhist temple in Thailand! Upon hearing that the Soviet army in Afghanistan has captured his former commanding officer, Colonel Troutman -- the man ultimately responsible for making his life a misery -- rather than assuming the lotus position and cracking open the champagne, Rambo sets out to rescue him.

This is pretty brainless stuff, but it passes an entertaining couple of hours if you're in the right mood. The production values are reasonably high, it's far better directed than "Rambo II", the photography is surprisingly attractive, and the suspension of ones disbelief is assisted by a stirring Jerry Goldsmith score and the fact that Stallone clearly performs at least some of his own stunts. There's a classic scene where Rambo cauterizes a shrapnel wound in his side, with less fuss than most of us mortals would make over a paper-cut.

On the downside, it's nauseatingly sentimental, and there's a precocious little Afghan brat who's so irritating that I spent the entire movie imagining him in a Celebrity Deathmatch with that little bastard from "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". As with other movies about Mujahideen rebels fighting with the Soviets in Afghanistan ("The Beast of War", "The Living Daylights") it hasn't aged very well, especially not the end title, which reads: "This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan."

A cliched, instantly forgettable prison movie, which affords Stallone ample opportunity to indulge his twin weaknesses: masochism and sentimentality. It's all very predictable, so as soon as Donald Sutherland's sadistic warden shows Sly his reconditioned electric chair, you know one or the other of them will be sitting in it before the end of the movie. Similarly, once Stallone takes green lifer Larry Romano under his wing, the kid's days are clearly numbered. Ramano's demise brings an untimely end to the most interesting aspect of the film: his tussle with Tom Sizemore for the honour of 'Most Irritating Performance in a Supporting Role'. Those reviewers who describe Sutherland's performance as 'over-the-top'--no pun intended, Stallone fans--have obviously yet to experience his extraordinary slice of ham in Bertolucci's "1900", in comparison with which he's positively understated here. Chances are, you'll soon wish you were watching "Escape from Alcatraz" instead.

Strangely, this is always overlooked in the list of the greatest 'Nam movies ever made! It's over a decade since the war ended, but the dastardly Soviet-sponsored Vietnamese may still be holding American PoWs. Only one man is level-headed enough to collect the definitive proof without waging a one-man Armageddon: combat-addled nutcase, John Rambo. Whatever its faults, "First Blood" was considerably more than just a brainless action movie. It's too easy to pick holes in "Rambo II", but one of the things which struck me was that the glut of villains merely dilutes the audience's loathing for anyone in particular, there being three main bad guys (Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff and the Vietnamese camp commandant) and three significant henchmen (Napier's two cronies and Berkoff's burly torturer). The actress playing Rambo's Vietnamese love interest is clearly more fluent in English than the script's awful lines of ungrammatical dialogue attest, which is probably why her performance is so bad. Predictably, Rambo signs her death warrant by offering to take her back to the States. A couple of interesting credits: the DP was Powell & Pressburger's regular cameraman, the great Jack Cardiff; and James Cameron co-wrote the screenplay.

As silly a cop thriller as you're likely to see. It's difficult to decide who's the most brainless here: the Police Department, who can't tell the difference between a lone serial killer and a gang of psycho bikers, even when Stallone gets into a car chase with, wait for it, TWO other vehicles; the gang leader, who decides the best way to protect his identity is to make ever more high profile and outrageous attacks on the witness who can identify him; or Stallone's maverick cop, who lets said witness fend for herself at the climax while he goes off wasting gang members. This outdoes most Schwarzenegger movies of the period for appalling one-liners, too.