Get Up and Go is the new movie from Brendan Grant and starring Love/Hate’s Peter Cooonan, Rian Smith went along to see if it was any use…
Every time there’s a new film about unemployed twenty-somethings searching for love/meaning, I hope it’s the new Swingers. If you haven’t seen it, see it. It launched the careers of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, and was fun and fast.
Get Up and Go is no Swingers.
Coilin and Alex (played by Love/Hate alumni Killian Scott and Peter Coonan) are apparently best friends. The story starts as Alex discovers he’s knocked up his girlfriend. So, for some reason, he has to get a grand together so that he can go to London, and he has to go tonight.
It’s just… flimsy. He doesn’t have to go to London, and a grand is such an arbitrary figure. And why today? Why not tomorrow? ‘It’s not who I am’, responds Alex, with the year’s most pointless character motivation.
From there, the film plays out the next 24 hours (and it feels like 24 hours) as Alex tries get the money, and Coilin tries win the heart of a girl he once slept with.
It’s weird how – having been on the same TV show for so long – the two leads share such little chemistry. In fact, it’s like an inverse maths equation: the film is at it’s best when the two are as far apart as possible.
Coonan is trying too hard to be Jack-the-Lad; his performance seems forced. Scott once again displays his particular brand of acting: as if he’s an alien, having just landed on earth. He’s trying to fit in by doing as humans do, but never quite getting it right.
They’re both failing creatives, Alex is an artist/musician; Coilin, a comedian. The selection of profession by writer/director Brendan Grant is a poor one. If the ‘social-commentary’ regarding the Irish’s need to emigrate was to work, the characters should at least look like they’re trying to get bill-paying jobs.
However, it’s not all bad. There’s a humorous (if fleeting) performance from Ryan McParland. The female actors all-round do their best with underdeveloped parts (I’m convinced one of them was changed to Welsh simply to differentiate who was who).
Get Up and Go was produced by Fastnet films, who previously made the excellent Kisses. It’s a pity then, and equally annoying, that Get Up and Go shares none of that film’s urgency. Maybe if it had some/any energy, the jokes would’ve worked and the story would’ve been engaging.
But it doesn’t, so it’s a bit of a sludge.
In the end, Get Up and Go never convinces us that it actually needed to be made.
2/5
Rian Smith