Two highway road workers spend the summer of 1988 away from their city lives. The isolated landscape becomes a place of misadventure as the men find themselves at odds with each other and the women they left behind.
Funny, sad and sometimes strange, Prince Avalanche is an imperfect oddity that deserves an audience.
Green fashions a slow-burn charmer that’s a million miles from Pineapple Express in tone, pace and content. But just like that film, the odd couple interplay is beautifully judged.
Gordon Green follows up a pair of execrable comedies with a wise and witty slow-motion road trip that catches the sun.
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The film was inspired by a cult Icelandic movie, Either Way, but with its deadan humour and self-consciously lyrical treatment of nature it plays like a more comic version of Kelly Reichardt's rural yarn Old Joy.
Prince Avalanche is mildly interesting but its promise never leads anywhere, like a sketch for a first act of a more substantial film by Hal Ashby or Bob Rafelson.
There's a nod to wider themes of America's dispossessed and a connection to the Icelandic movie Either Way (of which this is a loose remake) but none of the old magic promised by the return-to-roots 16-day shoot and stripped-down, Sundance-friendly production values.
David Gordon Green
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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