Director: Jack Spring
Cast: Filip Mayer, Richard Mason, Anna Dawson, David McClelland, Jane Hollington, Maurice Byrne
Rating: 15
Running time: 86mins
Release date: 01/03/2019
A brand new British Comedy, DESTINATION: DEWSBURY focuses on the long-term bonds between four school friends who are brought together when one of their other old school friends is found to be dying from cancer.
The four friends, Adam (David J Keogh), Gaz (Dan Shelton), Peter (Matt Sheahan) and Smithy (Tom Gilling), who were school mates at a North London haven back in the 1980s with the dying individual, Frankie, decide to make their pilgrimage to Dewsbury to catch up with him for one last celebration.
Along the way they tangle with gangsters, make a stop off point at an elderly swingers club and have to deal with their unwanted sixth school friend, Neville (Kevin Dewsbury), who seems to pop up whenever they least expect him to.
Cue the inevitable bad experiences and conflicts that personify such a British comedy, which reminds one of the same kind of road mishaps that hindered John Cleese in the 1986 comedy CLOCKWISE, in which he played a punctuality-happy headmaster who gets on the wrong train on his way to delivering a speech in Norwich.
The film has it’s heart in the right place and the chemistry between the four principal characters works well enough, but as is often the case, the film will of course need a much-needed boost to it’s release pattern in order the strike gold with the public.
Although the film has been understandably compared to THE INBETWEENERS, given the school bond that these characters have, it is more in keeping with the schenanigans of films like THE HANGOVER and ROAD TRIP, with a climax that is more serious than those films, so please be patient if the laughs and gross-out moments are not as frequent in this film, although there are one or two throughout.
The film had two recent premieres in its Leeds local cinema and at the Prince Charles Cinema and is the brainchild of upcoming director Jack Spring, who worked with a crew with an average age of 21 to bring this vision to life, which is considerable given the immense challenges that an independent production like this faces. Much promise is in store for the director in future, who is now on his first seven-figure budgeted production.
DESTINATION: DEWSBURY is released in select Showcase Cinemas from the 1st March. For more information, take a look here.
