The plot: Struggling writer Jon (Dean O’Gorman), after a
messy encounter with his ex Suzie (Antonia Prebble), is left struggling to
figure out how to make things right again. By chance, he happens upon Luke (James
Rolleston), who has stolen a car and hitting the road. He decides to help Jon
get his ex-girlfriend’s house, picking up disgruntled fast food worker Keira
(Ashleigh Cummings) along the way. As they go on their way, their antics on the
road draw the attention of the local police, Jon’s family and even the national
media, with them being dubbed the ‘Blondini Gang’.
O’Gorman is very endearing as the near-constant screw-up
Jon, who benefits from being the only one of the main three with a genuine arc
to his character so that we can enjoy all the ups and downs (well, mostly the
downs) he goes through, mostly by his own doing. Rolleston acts as the clearest
head of the main trio, and while he still joins in with the others in their
mishaps, the delivery of his dry dialogue combined with how he handles his
surprisingly tragic backstory never ceases to engage. Cummings continues what I
suspect is a running trend in Kiwi cinema, that being animal activism played up
for laughs, and she manages to balance that out with an immediately solid
impression on-screen and taking part in a romantic entanglement without it just
defining her character from then on. Seriously, after seeing so many bloody
movies go down that route, it’s nice to see that dodged here.
Antonia Prebble
works well as Jon’s ex-fiancé, wringing a lot of catharsis out of a certain
meeting between her and Jon early on in the film, Matt Whelan as Jon’s friend
Noah gets easily one of the funniest lines in the film and he delivers it
perfectly, and Thomas Sainsbury as Bongo takes only a single scene and comes
out of it one of the best things in the entire film.
Maybe it’s just because my past experience with modern road
trips hasn’t panned out so well (Vacation, A Few Less Men, The Long Haul, etc.)
but this feels like a serious breath of fresh air. Knowing how actual road
trips turn out, with many hours of sweating and arguing and the endless piss
breaks, engaging in a fictional one would usually involve people you want to be stuck in a confined space
with, right? Otherwise, it kind of feels like literal Hell, being stuck with
people you would cross galaxies to avoid and are apparently supposed to find
charming. This is a very definite departure from that. While slapstick setups
are embedded in the characters, their characterisation as a whole is very
grounded and natural and, dare I say it, relatable. These are the kind of
people you would want to get lost on
the road with, as the conversation alone would make the trip worth it.
Along with being a welcome departure from what I’ve come to
expect from road trip ventures, the same goes for the sense of humour on
display. With the modern pandemic of line-o-rama taking over most contemporary
comedies, there’s usually a lack of reason why these particular people would
actually say stuff like this. It makes sense that they’re playing to an out-of-universe
audience, but in-universe? Not so much. Here, the dialogue between our main
leads feels like they’re also trying to get laughs, but out of people they can
see. It’s mostly situational, riffing on the bonkers events going on around
them or the frequent mistakes that the others in the trio make, and while they
don’t exactly let stupid decisions go unanswered, it never goes into the area
of needlessly hateful. They come across like conversations that actual human
beings have, without even a hint of a fourth wall to appeal to, only
themselves.
That’s where the grounding ends, though, but that is in no
way a bad thing. This plays out like the Oceanic answer to The Blues Brothers,
employing the same sense of accidental carnage to similarly exhilarating ends.
And fittingly enough, it all starts with the car itself. The rather gaudy look
of the vehicle, that being a bright yellow Mini, ends up creating comedy on its
own once you see Luke drive it like a race car, leading to some damn cool car
chases and stunts. It may lose some points for pulling one of the oldest tricks
in the comedic playbook, that being juxtaposing pieces of classical music like
Ride Of The Valkyries against the ‘most unorthodox’ set pieces, but the
creativity on display in the locales used still rings through. It also works on
a similar level to Burn After Reading, where laughs are derived from how much
chaos is going on over basically nothing. Police chases, a psychotic gunman, an
animal activist movement which has a rave titled “The Silence Of The Lambs”,
complete with Hannibal cosplay; all of this surrounding a guy just trying to
make amends with his ex. The weird part is that, even as the drama starts to
creep in and his arc reaches its conclusion, all of this calamity doesn’t cut
into how effective that denouement is. It’s predictable but it still works.
All in all, this is a very fun road trip. I won’t pretend to
have seen the original Goodbye Pork Pie that this is a remake of, but honestly,
I don’t think I need prior experience to see the genuine good this has to
offer. The acting is solid, the action scenes are a nice showcasing of
practical car stunts (with a shot fired at Michael Bay to further its point,
which has endeared me to this film for life), the humour is among the most
natural I’ve yet covered on this blog in terms of dialogue, the set pieces give
the film a good amount of variety, and the story itself builds on familiar
parts to make for a pleasant ride.
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