Ride the Eagle is a film written and directed by two alumni from a sweet little American sitcom called New Girl – writer and star Jake Johnson and director Trent O’Donnell.
And like that show, it seems rather poor taste to be unkind to it.
I did like Jake Johnson well enough before I bailed from New Girl, suffering from an overdose of niceness. In Ride the Eagle he plays a not dissimilar role.
Photo: Screenshot
Leif is an under-achieving bloke who plays bongos in a part-time band. One day he gets bad news - his long-estranged mother Honey has recently died, leaving a lot of instructions for him.
Back when Leif was a child, Honey ran off to find herself in one of those communes that were big in the Nineties.
This is her attempt to make up for lost time – and parenting – from beyond the veil.
Inevitably Honey is played – mostly on videotape – by Susan Sarandon who seems to have been doing ageing hippies for most of her career.
Anyway, Leif is summoned to Honey’s cabin in California’s Yosemite Valley, and starts to work his way through the list of tasks-stroke-valuable life lessons.
Your reaction to this plotline may depend on your attitude to rebellious hippies and their pot-smoking, free-loving ways.
In the last couple of years there has been a noticeable shift in that particular demographic.
Covid alone has taken the shine off people who pride themselves in sneering at conventional medicine, for instance.
And these days maverick independent thinkers are rather less appealing – and more violent – than they were back in the innocent days of Woodstock.
But Ride the Eagle manages to escape the QAnon curse with a small, attractive cast.
Under orders from his late mother, Leif makes a phone call to a long-time ex-girlfriend, Audrey - D’Arcy Carden, the multi-faceted Janet in another TV favourite The Good Place.
D’Arcy adds some appealing spikiness to a character that could have easily slipped into the dreaded “pixie dream girl”, so beloved in films like Ride the Eagle.
And when J K Simmons arrives on the scene too, it’s hard not to warm towards Ride the Eagle - slightly more than it deserves perhaps.
Still, a good cast can cover a multitude of sins, and if you buy into it – which I pretty much did, despite myself – you’ll find it easy to go along on Leif’s journey.
But it’s undeniably an old-fashioned hippie dream – from the jars of weed stashed in every cupboard in the cabin, to its gorgeous vistas of mountains, rivers and lakes, like a Jackson Browne album cover brought to life.
Maybe the storyline clunks a little at times, but it always rights itself, particularly when Jake Johnson and D’Arcy Carden are on the screen.
Yes, Honey herself can be a little annoying, but it’s part of the film’s charm that it’s aware.
Some of the funniest moments in the film are Leif cringing at his mother’s excesses.
A “To Do List” written by someone else can easily build up a certain amount of resentment. But Honey manages to win Leif over - and by implication us – even when the advice seems occasionally goofy. Maybe because of that.
Like the title Ride the Eagle, sometimes it’s enough that its heart is in the right place - even if it doesn’t always make literal sense.
