There is great potential in the kick-off to this debut fiction feature from one of our great cinematic polymaths. A teenage boy (Charlie Reid), fleeing his dodgy father, leaps into the front of a taxi and accelerates towards freedom. He then realises there is a woman (Olivia Colman, no less) and a baby in the back seat. Their contrasting problems interlock and grind as the journey continues.
Unfortunately, Emer Reynolds’s film never thereafter finds a consistent tone or a satisfactory narrative rhythm. Plenty of good actors turn up to offer the sort of comic cameos we remember from Irish comedies about missing bags of money in the millennial years. David Pearse makes the most of a brief scene as an eccentric showband singer with van and furry dice. The indomitable Olwen Fouéré appears and reappears as a purposeless drunk eccentric. The pinballing takes our heroes from high comedy to grim confession to puzzling personal emergency. Nothing sums up the oddness better — or more unfortunately — than a persistent robin redbreast, first introduced as over-literal accompaniment to an appropriate bubblegum pop hit.
Still, we do have fine performers at the helm. We hardly need to recommend Olivia Colman further, and, despite an Irish accent that wanders back and forth across these islands within individual clauses, she just about wrestles the curiously drawn Joy into submission. (Yes, she’s called Joy. Joyride? Get it?) Young Charlie Reid is also to be praised for accommodating dialogue that does not always sound as if written for a character of his tender years. The actor is a charmer and he clicks satisfactorily with his Oscar-winning companion.
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. For all its looming menace and adult themes, the Irish road movie it most resembles is the St Patrick’s Day classic Flight of the Doves. Like that family entertainment, it clatters the characters from one class of domestic shindig to another without allowing pause for thought. The kids in Flight of the Doves meet Dana in a Travellers’ caravan. The mismatched couple in Joyride end up at some class of pagan festival. The world is none the worse for either film existing.
