A Bump Along the Way (2019)
(On Cable TV, February 2022) Ugh. It’s not that A Bump Along the Way is a bad film, or that it’s badly made, or that it doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s just that I didn’t enjoy it at all. Taking us in Derry’s working-class neighbourhood, this Irish “comedy” starts with the premise of a 44-year-old single mom becoming pregnant, and the conflicts that this creates with her strait-laced daughter, who has to endure considerable humiliation at school. It’s humiliation-based comedy at its basest, and no one in the cast was chosen through beauty contest. As a result, director Shelly Love’s film has a raw nature that some will find authentic, and others off-putting. I’ll count myself among the latter—it doesn’t take a long time to figure out that I didn’t want to spend any more time with those characters in that situation, and the film’s 95 minutes eventually felt interminable. It all leads to a heartwarming mother/daughter reconciliation that does end the film on a welcome flourish, but the way getting there… ugh.