Joyride

Joyride is terrific, a storytelling and acting gem bursting with heart yet never saccharine.

Though the inimitable Colman can’t help but muscle an admirable performance out of the overly sentimental material, her immense talent dwarfs the melodramatic surroundings.

This odd-couple comedy road movie paints its characters in brushstrokes so broad you could land a jumbo jet on them, while the intrusively affable score lurches into every scene like a drunk with no concept of personal space. And yet Colman saves the picture, her thorny performance gradually revealing a well of pain.

Joyride, a grievously schematic blend of odd-couple comedy and life-affirming road movie, traverses the Irish countryside with a small degree of charm and a boatload of blarney.

Colman does her absolute best to counter a scenario that manages to be both strangely off-putting and patly predictable, by shaping up a tartly unsentimental turn.

There is nothing much to actively dislike here. Reynolds, a hugely experienced editor who won an Emmy for directing the superb documentary The Farthest, keeps the energy high and allows her fine cast to exercise all muscles. But Joyride feels like old-fashioned stuff.

Every actor involved sells it hard and it’s good natured, but the unbelievability factor is just too high.

I had the misfortune of being next to my dearly beloved when she pressed the button play on the remote. I was then subjected to what can only be described as mental abuse. Here's why: the key protagonist played by colman (who is a premenopausal woman in real life) who is a young mother who can't and won't take care of her newborn. Already the story is derailed, her chances of natural conception at this age are less than a percent, with assisted technologies being preferred. For some kind of reason, she encounters a teen boy who explains her how breastfeeding works because she ran out of powdered milk. Again, that's not how this works: it was a geriatric pregnancy in ireland/uk, so she would have had more support than anyone can imagine. Being a sollicitor, we should expect her to have higher intelligence so to pay more attention to things and have a better memory than a teen-mother. So that makes no sense, after that I blacked out and emerged to watch the teen boy stealing an ice cream truck not being stopped by anyone (that is plausible given how the police works over there). There's a big dramatic sequence on the beach with our three stooges and it was meaningless. The dialogs are uninteresting, the lives of the protagonists are equally uninteresting, there's a good dose of PC messaging. As a conclusion for potential viewers: watch this only if you hate yourself, otherwise go for a walk.