Film reviews: Make it to Munich | Good One | Final Destination: Bloodlines | Hallow Road

Good One (15) ★★★★

Final Destination: Bloodlines (15) ★★★

Hallow Road (15) ★★

In 2023 Scottish teenager Ethan Walker was at the start of what might have been a promising football career when he was hit by a car in New York state while away at college on a football scholarship. Suffering catastrophic injuries — including two brain bleeds, multiple fractures and a dislocated knee — it wasn’t clear if he’d survive, let alone walk again. And yet, just nine months after the accident, this football obsessed 18-year-old embarked on a 1,200km cycle from Glasgow to Munich to deliver the Scotland team’s pennant for the opening match of Euro 2024.

Directed by Martyn Robertson (Ride the Wave), Make it to Munich follows Ethan’s journey from its Hampden starting point, where Scotland’s vice captain John McGinn seems to think Munich is 12,000 miles away — an amusing faux pas that becomes emblematic of the so-near-yet-so-far fate of the national team’s humiliating Euro campaign. But the film isn’t about that. Joining Ethan is sports surgeon Gordon Mackay, who got him walking again, and whose own status as a former aspiring footballer subtly reinforces Ethan’s gradual acceptance that just because his dream of playing professionally is over, a career in football isn’t.

It’s human moments like this that fuel the film, which is low on amped-up dramatic incidents, but good at teasing out more interesting aspects, like Ethan’s obvious discomfort at one of his former teachers making a show of giving him public support despite never giving him the time of day at school. Mostly, though, the film is a tribute to this unassuming teenager’s indomitable spirit.

Filtering a male buddy mid-life crisis film through the lens of a female coming-of-age story, India Donaldson’s quiet, mesmeric wilderness movie Good One is one of the more striking US debuts of recent years. That’s partly down to a remarkable performance from newcomer Lily Collias as the film’s protagonist, Sam, a 17-year-old girl who finds herself in the suddenly awkward position of being the third wheel on a camping trip with her dad, Chris (James Le Gros), and Chris’ best friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) when Matt’s own teenage son bails at the last minute. As both men wind each other up while grousing about their myriad woes (divorce, career disappointments, parenting, paths not taken), Sam quietly observes their sad-dad energy, not unsympathetically, but with enough sense of her own self to see through their self-pitying lack of perspective.

The film eventually turns on a throwaway comment that’s anything but throwaway in its intent. Rather than descend into melodrama, though, Donaldson’s granular approach lets the ripples of betrayal that follow play out on Collias’s wonderfully expressive face. Here, the film’s ability to observe the emotional complexities of friendship and family against the splendour of the great outdoors recalls Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and Debra Granick’s Leave No Trace, yet it also marks Donaldson out as filmmaker to watch in her own right. And Collias is just magnificent.

Arriving in the midst of a raft of bloodless B-movie remakes and torture porn excesses, the Final Destination franchise gave horror fans in the early 2000s some reliably gruesome fun thanks to an ingeniously simple premise (there’s no escaping Death) and some inventively bloody set-pieces that played out like the world’s most deadly health-and-safety videos. Fourteen years on from the last instalment, Final Destination: Bloodlines tweaks the mythology a little by having Death now stalk successive generations of the same family rather than random friends or strangers bound together by the collective avoidance of a deadly catastrophe.

The film opens by winding the clock back to the 1960s with a prolonged set-piece in which a newly pregnant woman called Iris (played by Brec Bassinger) has a premonition of an impending disaster at the opening of a sky tower-style restaurant. Cut to the present day and her survivalist instincts mean Death — forever trying to balance the books — is now on the prowl for all her descendants who, by rights, shouldn’t exist, including her estranged granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who’s never met Iris, but is suddenly plagued with her sanity-threatening premonitions.

The film makes a token effort to explore Stafani’s odd family dynamic, but this series has always thrived on its own sense of hopelessness and is at its most effective and fun when dispensing sick punchlines that reinforce death’s inevitability. That said, it does provide a surprisingly poignant send-off for the late horror legend Tony Todd, a series regular since the first film.

Hallow Road finds Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys well cast as stressed-out parents driving to help their distraught daughter after she knocks over a stranger while driving under the influence in the middle of the night.

Confined, Locke-style, to their car for most of the real-time journey, the film initially works as a fraught exploration of a marriage under duress, until, that is, it veers wildly off course with a silly supernatural twist that doesn’t come off at all.

Make it to Munich, Good One and Hallow Road are in cinemas from 16 May; Final Destination: Bloodlines is in cinemas from 14 May