Movie Reviews: Hit and Run, On the Road, Ruby Sparks, Hotel Transylvania

Most road trip movies take the scenic route, stop off to smell the roses, take a little time to wonder what this crazy ol’ world is all about. As its title suggests, however, Hit and Run (15A) puts pedal to metal from the off: Annie (Kristen Bell) needs to get to LA in order to take up a new teaching position, so her boyfriend Charlie agrees to drive her. So far, so good, except Charlie is in the Witness Protection Programme, and soon the pair are being chased all over the Midwest by bad guys (led by a dreadlocked Bradley Cooper), a US Marshal (Tom Arnold), an unlikely pair of cops, and a hillbilly who covets Charlie’s souped-up Lincoln muscle car. Shepard, who wrote the screenplay and co-directs alongside David Palmer, plays Charlie as an hilariously unreconstructed guy in constant need of correction by Annie, a conflict resolution expert: between them, Shepard and Bell create a believable chemistry which is the quiet heart of this adrenaline-fuelled thriller. Smart dialogue and a series of caper-comedy chase scenarios suggest that Shepard has watched more of his fair share of Tarantino and Coen Brothers movies, and even if you’ll see the ending coming a mile off, there’s plenty of twists, turns, and dumb fun along the way.

Arguably the most famous literary road trip of them all, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (16s) is adapted for the big screen by Jose Rivera and helmed by Walter Salles. Sam Riley stars as Sal Paradise, the alter-ego of Jack Kerouac, who crisscrosses America in a hedonistic haze during the post-WWII years in the company of fellow Beat writers and poets, represented by Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), Carlo Marx (Dean Sturridge) and Old Bull Lee (Viggo Mortensen). Fuelled by sex, drugs, and be-bop jazz, the characters celebrate ‘the one noble function of the time — to move’, although the reality of their libertarianism is more sordid than the legend permits. A crew of thieving leeches and middle-class chaps playing at hobos — the women, played by Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, and Kirsten Dunst, are little more than sex puppets. The Beat boys depicted here are a reprehensible lot. It’s beautifully shot and authentically grubby, but it’s all dangerously close to watching a student’s home movie about Rag Week.