Mad Money and Rambo (both 2008)

At face value "Mad Money" and "Rambo" could not be any more different. One is a female-centered comedy about Federal Reserve Bank employees illegally taking home some extra pay. It stars Diane Keaton. "Rambo," of course, is another sequel in the hugely successful franchise about a real Army of One. It stars Sylvester Stallone. Yet, these films are exactly alike: They celebrate, grovel and re-live the excessive screw-you 1980s, when money was God and no explosion or body count was considered too high in film.

The kicker: "Rambo" is the better movie. By default.

What the hell happened to Diane Keaton? The glorious, supremely intelligent star of "Annie Hall," "Reds" and "The Godfather" is coasting in "Mad Money." The film is saddled with lackluster direction, a script uninterested in actual characters or logic, and terrible editing that repeatedly kills any momentum. I'm no champion of morality in film; heck, I love "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country for Old Men," but "Mad" actually demands us to agree that getting everything you want by any means necessary is every American's duty. By God, there are actual scenes where characters throw wads of money in the air and frolic under the falling paper. Maybe they'll show this to wild applause at the RNC or an oil speculator's convention. Rounding out Keaton's gang is Queen Latifah, who adds spark, and Katie Holmes, playing a ditz. Ted Danson plays the film's conscience, for a while. Then he's worshiping money. D-

"Rambo" is pure Stallone-American-red meat bravado. John Rambo, now seemingly in his early 60s, is living in Thailand, just off the border of Burma (now Myanmar). His existence is nil -- he tells anyone who crosses his path, "I don't give a funk," or something like that. Rambo is awakened from his, err, funk, by a group of sweetly seriously stupid Christian missionaries seeking passage into Burma. The group quickly is captured by the ruling junta once they reach their destination, and then tortured. And with that Rambo is back. The action is over the top: slow mo shots show Rambo mowing down soldiers with ease, they're heads, limbs and torsos flying apart like smashed strawberry jelly jars. And oddly, one hopes Rambo could pull the real Myanmar junta down. A character jokes that sometimes it takes the devil to do God's work. Sadly, he's right. Stallone is more spry here than he was in the "Rocky Balboa." But he's still 60, and the film never addresses that. Character development has never been high in the "Rambo" pantheon. Only the clank of a machine gun counts. B-