There is a good movie lurking within writer/director Cinqué Lee’s survivalist coming-of-age thriller “Last Ride.” It’s just suspended between two half-told stories.
Lee is the younger brother of director Spike Lee, an executive producer on this film. On top of co-writing “Crooklyn” and the Netflix adaptation of “She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee has carved out his own filmmaking career, co-directing “Burn Out The Day” and helming the sci-fi fantasy “Window on Your Present” and the zero-budget docufictional indie “UR4 Given.” “Last Ride,” however, is Lee’s first directorial effort in sixteen years. His storytelling rust shows.
At its inception, the film makes a fatal error. A drunken man (Gustaf Skarsgård) is awakened from his woodland slumber by his son (Samuel Paul Small) and his son’s dealer (Jasper Pääkkönen). The intoxicated man wants to head to the top of a Norwegian mountain with the pair, for reasons that’ll soon become obvious. From there, we flash back to March 10, 1982. Three American kids: Devin (Roman Griffin Davis), Syd (Felix Jamieson), and Jamie (Charlie Price)—are begging the cable car operator Øyvind (Kristofer Hivju) to take them to, you guessed it, the top of the mountain. He’s initially apprehensive about the prospects but relents when he discovers that they’re also fans of the Clash. Their ascent, which involves rocking out to “London Calling,” is abruptly stopped by a power outage. They are trapped, dangling in a cable car high above a cliff.
Because of the opening, you can pretty intuit how this is all going to end. What’s required to keep one invested in the film despite that knowledge is characters interesting enough to overcome its predictability and single setting. In that regard, “Last Ride” mightily struggles. Lee leans on the fact that these kids are, well, kids. That means they’re not totally sure why they’re stuck. They only know that the town of Vargoy below is dark. They can only hope their parents find them. In the meantime, they begin imagining zombies and other mysterious occurrences—like a rare planetary alignment—to fill the void of their isolation.
Sometimes, through their childish ramblings, we discover revelations about why they’re so sullen and cynical. Devin’s mom and Jamie’s dad, for instance, who are mostly unseen during the film, may be in a fling together. Syd, meanwhile, is dealing with his own acre of trauma. In any case, the trio of actors does demonstrate some rapport, even if their characters—none of whom come off as Americans—are fairly uninteresting. And while one can applaud Lee for not reaching for melodramatic twists, these kids instead marvel at the northern lights and slowly learn to be more empathetic toward one another; not enough narratively or emotionally happens to hold one’s attention.
Still, Lee keeps things visually interesting by maximizing the number of different cable-car and weather-patterning options to place these kids within. The snow and wind effects provide a real sense of danger, while the atmospheric sounds of wheezing, clinks, and clanks further the environmental storytelling. Much of this effort, however, goes for naught because the film builds toward an ending we already know. That knowledge consistently pulls you away from the narrative; you’re simply anticipating the period leading into the winding sentence that is this film.
