49 Miles More – Review
Sometimes it’s the little indie films that nobody’s really shouting about, that end up catching you off guard the most. 49 Miles More is one of those. On paper it’s a scrappy British “buddy” comedy about two mates stranded miles from anywhere. In practice, it turns into something rather more touching than that.
Directed by Oliver Cox, the film follows Max (Reece Henderson), an unlucky insurance salesman who’s never quite worked out where he fits, and his carefree best mate Doug (Gregory Fung), as they head off to their annual university reunion. When their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, the pair end up walking the remaining miles on foot, and as I mentioned, this stranded mates setup gradually reveals itself to be something with far more heart underneath.
It’s clearly a low-budget production, and to the film’s credit, it mostly works with that rather than against it. This is very much a two-hander, Henderson and Fung carrying the vast majority of the runtime between them, and for the most part that focus pays off. You get proper time with these two, their rhythm together, the old jokes, the digs, the bits of history you can tell exist even when they’re not spelled out. It’s well shot too, making decent use of the countryside they’re trudging through, with a couple of scenes in particular that look far better than the budget and crew of five probably allowed for.
Where it does show its limitations is in the sort of scenes that clearly want a wider cast of supporting faces to really land, but don’t quite have the numbers to pull it off. A couple of comedic beats also feel like they’re building towards a bigger laugh than they actually get, you can see the joke coming, see the setup working hard for it, and then it just doesn’t quite land with the punch it’s reaching for. The acting throughout is solid, Henderson and Fung both give committed, likeable performances, which is fortuitous considering it’s largely just them on screen.
Somewhere along the 49-mile walk, the film quietly shifts from comedy into something a lot more poignant, dealing with grief and the way friendship can carry people through it, and it’s genuinely surprising how much it earns that shift. It would have been easy for a film like this to lean entirely on the laughs and coast, but there’s real feeling underneath the banter here, and by the end it sneaks up on you in a way I definitely wasn’t expecting.
49 Miles More isn’t a slick production, and it doesn’t need to be. What it’s got is two engaging leads, a script that knows when to put the jokes down and let something quieter take over, and an emotional weight that hits harder than a film this size has any right to. Worth the walk.
49 Miles More is on UK digital 17 August from Reel2Reel Films
