JOYRIDE TBC
Road warriors…
★★★★★ OUT 29 JULY CINEMAS
Few phrases are a better or surer sign of a film’s quality than “starring Olivia Colman”. And to its credit, Joyride gives one of Britain’s finest thespians another juicy part. Colman plays Joy, a quick-witted hot mess of a solicitor with a drinking problem, a baby to put up for adoption and a holiday booked in Lanzarote. When she teams up with precocious young singer Mully (Charlie Reid), a kid on the run with a wad of stolen cash, the unlikely pair hit the road to take the baby to a new home before Joy can make her flight.
Colman is wonderful here, as she always is, but director Emer Reynolds struggles to settle on a consistent tone throughout the film. Bouncing between characters in agonising trauma and happy-go-lucky road-trippin’ sequences, the film steers through landscape that’s so brightly lit and beautiful you could be watching covert advertising for the Irish tourism board.
Joyride boasts several whimsical sequences and an exemplary use of colour, but suffers by comparison for being the first Colman film since
The Lost Daughter. Some of the film’s ideas around womanhood feel regressive in comparison with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s far more nuanced story about the “crushing responsibility of motherhood”. There’s joy to be had spending time with these characters, but the journey, unfortunately, isn’t a particularly special one. THE VERDICT A scrappy young tearaway and a woman in crisis team up for a perfectly pleasant road-trip movie, but one whose roads are already well travelled.