Off the Rails, review: Kelly Preston’s final film is a threadbare travel comedy
Dir: Jules Williamson. 15 cert, 94 mins
There is something utterly perplexing about this British comedy, in which three middle-aged women go on an Interrailing trip with the daughter of a recently departed friend: it’s as if the cast and crew were planning to make a musical, then got to the set and decided they couldn’t be bothered.
The reason for this is that Off the Rails contains no less than 16 songs by Blondie, which one might assume would line up meaningfully with certain scenes, or reflect the characters’ emotions at pivotal points in the story, or at least bear some passing connection to the plot.
But with a couple of exceptions, they do not. From ‘Call Me’ over the opening credits, to ‘Rip Her to Shreds’ as the foursome clatter into a hostel in one of Paris’s grottier quartiers, to Call Me (again) as they race from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon after a ticketing mix-up, the tracks are essentially sonic wallpaper, switchable with the back catalogues of anyone from S Club 7 to Black Sabbath with minimal reshoots required. Are we watching a dry run for an all-singing, all-dancing stage version? Since the film was produced by Bill Kenwright, the veteran West End impresario, it’s hard not to wonder.
Jules Williamson’s debut feature only clicks during an early funeral scene, at which a plaintive arrangement of the band’s 1979 single ‘Dreaming’ is played on the organ. The 18-year-old soloist is Maddie (Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips); the funeral is her mother Anna’s, who has died after a long and painful illness. Maddie has moral support in the form of her grandmother, who’s played by Judi Dench in a brief cameo appearance that feels like it’s happening primarily for trailer-zhuzhing purposes. But the members of the congregation most moved by this performance are Kate (Jenny Seagrove), Liz (Sally Phillips) and Cassie (the late Kelly Preston), three of Anna’s oldest friends, who drifted apart in adulthood.
Afterwards, Judi presents the trio with an envelope containing four Interrail passes: they’re a parting gift from Anna, who wants them to retrace a formative backpacking trip with Maddie in her place. So off they chug to Paris, Girona, Barcelona and finally Palma, where they hope to witness a rare phenomenon at the cathedral of La Seu, which is referred to in this film, but apparently nowhere else, as “God’s Disco Ball”. (In Spanish it’s called the Espectáculo del Ocho, the spectacle of the eight, and involves the light filtering through one stained-glass window aligning with another.)
So ensues an hour and a half of confected crises, as the ladies cause trouble in a snooty French boutique, are arrested while drunk at a Catalan folk festival, help to deliver a baby during a lengthy and inexplicable detour to Italy, and so on. The premise isn’t bad – you can just about see it working as a jukebox singalong in the Mamma Mia! vein – but the three lead roles are threadbare, and the antics rote.
Phillips does give a bit of comic welly to the hyper-organised, hygiene-conscious GP Liz – although a subplot concerning her husband’s possible infidelity is left weirdly unresolved. Seagrove’s cash-strapped and professionally frustrated Kate is the wet blanket of the group, though consolation arrives in the form of a Tinder date with Ben Miller.
As for Preston’s Cassie, she’s a glamorous, frisky American actress with a nasty divorce underway: at one point she ends up in bed with Franco Nero, whose rich mahogany hair-dye must have consumed at least half the special-effects budget. Fond memories and old grudges are both re-aired in front of lovely picture-postcard views: you know the drill, as does everyone here tramping through it.
The closest thing the film has to a wild card is young Maddie – though Jordan Waller’s screenplay panics and gets rid of her for a vast stretch of its final act, with the three grown-ups working on the by-no-means-justified assumption that she’s decided to make her own way to Palma, and they’ll see her at the church. Off the Rails was the last film Preston made before her death at 57 last year, and is rather sweetly dedicated to her memory. But in the context of her career – and those of her cast-mates – it’s less a high than a blip.
In cinemas on Friday
