Film review: Olivia Colman and Charlie Reid make for a good double act in Joyride

Set on the back roads and boreens of the West of Ireland, there’s plenty of Irish talent on hand to lend support too

Olivia Colman as Joy and Charlie Reid as Mully. Picture: PA 

★★★☆☆

Joyride (15A) opens with teenage tearaway Mully (Charlie Reid) stealing a taxi, only to discover that Joy (Olivia Colman) is asleep in the back seat. Complicating matters is the fact that Joy has a days-old infant with her.

The good news is that the baby is Joy’s; the bad news is that she’ll be on her way to Lanzarote just as soon as she dumps the baby on her sister’s doorstep. Mully, however, doesn’t fancy chauffeuring Joy around the country — he’s just stolen a wad of cash from his wheeler-dealer father James (Lochlann O’Mearáin) and needs to disappear fast.

Can the bickering pair find a way to see past their differences? Written by Ailbhe Keogan and directed by Emer Reynolds, Joyride is a buddy-buddy road movie that plays out on the back roads and boreens of the West of Ireland. It’s a classic odd couple set-up: Joy is an ostensibly refined solicitor, albeit one with a richly crude vocabulary, while Mully is the kind of chap Joy tends to see a lot of in court.

Olivia Colman and Charlie Reid make for a good double act, with Colman bringing the gravitas and Reid showcasing some impressively foul-mouthed comic delivery in his feature-length debut, and there’s plenty of Irish talent on hand to lend support — Olwen Fouéré, Ruth McCabe and the criminally underemployed, David Pearse, to name but three.

The sheer number of twists and turns required to keep the show on the road for the full 90 minutes grows increasingly improbable the longer it all goes on, but for the most part Joyride is a pleasantly charming diversion.

(Cinema release)