Rambo, starring Arulnithi and Tanya Ravichandran, is the kind of film that tries to wear many hats—sports drama, social message thriller, romance, and action entertainer—only to end up being a confused mess with neither emotional depth nor narrative clarity. Marketed as a gritty tale with kickboxing at its core, the film falls flat due to lazy writing, illogical situations, and painfully weak characterisation.

The story follows Rambo, a street-fighting kickboxer, who crosses paths with Malar, a woman on the run from Gautham, the heir to a powerful educational empire. Malar is the key witness in a crime that could potentially land Gautham behind bars. That premise had enough scope for a tense action thriller—but the treatment is so absurd that one stops expecting logic within the first fifteen minutes. From a rich industrialist plotting the murder of a child just because his son came second in class, to goons casually roaming around announcing crores as ransom like they are bargaining for vegetables, Rambo is built on a script that insults the audience’s intelligence. Even the protagonist mocks the plot at one point by questioning how both the hero and villain seem to have endless piles of cash—an unintentional self-burn by the makers.

Despite projecting kickboxing as Rambo’s identity, the sport becomes irrelevant in key moments. Instead of using his supposed self-defence skills realistically, the film throws in overdone slow-motion stunts, dramatic jump cuts, and physics-defying punches straight out of a dated mass masala template. The villain lacks menace, the heroine lacks agency, and the hero lacks purpose.

With half-baked humour, cringe-worthy dialogues, and zero emotional connect, Rambo misses both its punches and point. It’s a hollow attempt at action storytelling—forgettable, flawed, and frustrating.