| A survival tale about life and death that would not have to be a survival tale at all if it were not for teenage boys. Three American boys, young teenagers, are on vacation in Norway with two parents, but they run off to take a cable car ride up a mountain. The boys, behaving as teenage boys would, are immature with zero care of safety for others or themselves, so they goad a cable car operator into taking them up even though the lift has just closed for the day. | | 2026
Directed by: Cinqué Lee
Screenplay by: Cinqué Lee
Starring: Roman Griffin Davis, Felix Jamieson, Charlie Price
|
The car stops working mid-air, high over a mountain town, and electricity from a cable kills the attendant. The boys are now trapped in the cable car during a freezing cold Norwegian night. Logic tells viewers that all they have to do is wait until morning – this is a popular cable car service for a tourist restaurant on the mountain, as soon as it re-opens they will be rescued. But teenage boys do not have that kind of patience so they make things way worse than need be. Which is likely going to test the patience of viewers. I often find real survival tales interesting, but fictional ones like this where the stupidity of fictional characters take things from bad to worse, are not all that interesting.
Within minutes, the boys start considering cannibalism – apparently they think they will starve to death if they 12 hours without food. When it starts getting dark, they find an emergency flare which helps birds find them, and helps kills some birds. These are just bad ideas. The only thing that could kill them is the cold, but they have winter clothes, a dead body, and each other. But instead they keep opening the cable car doors for more bad reasons.
There are some good ideas within this movie. The boys take the opportunity for the perfect view of the northern lights, and they start talking – finally, actually talking about real things – about the death of a parent, and how therapy should not be ridiculed. I agree with the film that it takes a life-altering moment for teenage boys to finally stop behaving like immature idiots for a brief moment in time, but the story that those lessons are wrapped in is not enjoyable at all.
The boys in Last Ride manage to make the situation worse and worse. The film does not help matters by bookending it with a present-day epilogue about how surviving that night made life worse in the future. Survival tales are supposed to be uplifting, this is the exact opposite.
|
