Kelly Preston’s final film a testament to bonds of female friendship

Off the Rails ★★★½
(M), 94 minutes

In movies, as in life, the premature death of a close friend can inspire people to undertake an exhaustive audit of their lives so far. They get together for a weekend of searing home truths, or they take a nostalgia trip, revisiting old haunts or places they have long meant to visit while a pertinent soundtrack sets the mood and pace.

In The Big Chill, it was an assortment of rhythm and blues hits from the 1960s. In Off the Rails, it’s Blondie. Debbie Harry hits accompany Cassie (Kelly Preston), Kate (Jenny Seagrove) and Liz (Sally Phillips) as they travel through Europe with train tickets bequeathed to them by Anna, a friend from their youth, on the condition they take her teenage daughter, Maddie (Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips), with them.

The film opens with Anna’s funeral, which is shorter but just as moving as the exemplary model in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, largely because Judi Dench delivers the eulogy as Anna’s sorrowing mother.

She’s the one who hands over the tickets to the group and it’s clear she thinks none of the three ever spent enough time with her daughter, so the pressure is on to make sure that they do their best in honouring her memory.

It doesn’t take long for the fissures and fractures in their relationships to appear. Kate and Cassie are extremely terse with one another, having once quarrelled over a man – Cassie’s ex-husband – and Cassie can’t help teasing Liz about her tendency to over-organise.

The itinerary follows the traditional lines of a British feel-good movie. They start in Paris and move on to Spain and Italy, shopping, dancing, getting drunk and falling briefly in love with men met along the way – Ben Miller and Franco Nero step in at this point. They successfully handle small crises brought on by snooty Parisian shop assistants, lost passports and train breakdowns. Liz, a GP, and Cassie, who stars as a nurse in an American TV soap, even manage to deliver a baby.

It’s predictable but cheery. Phillips, an assured feel-good performer best remembered for the advice she dispensed as Shazza in Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequels, is responsible for most of the laughs and Preston, a Meg Ryan look-alike, is glamorous and good-natured as the free-spirited Cassie, who tends to forget everything else when romance is in the offing.

Off the Rails ★★★½
(M), 94 minutes

In movies, as in life, the premature death of a close friend can inspire people to undertake an exhaustive audit of their lives so far. They get together for a weekend of searing home truths, or they take a nostalgia trip, revisiting old haunts or places they have long meant to visit while a pertinent soundtrack sets the mood and pace.

In The Big Chill, it was an assortment of rhythm and blues hits from the 1960s. In Off the Rails, it’s Blondie. Debbie Harry hits accompany Cassie (Kelly Preston), Kate (Jenny Seagrove) and Liz (Sally Phillips) as they travel through Europe with train tickets bequeathed to them by Anna, a friend from their youth, on the condition they take her teenage daughter, Maddie (Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips), with them.

The film opens with Anna’s funeral, which is shorter but just as moving as the exemplary model in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, largely because Judi Dench delivers the eulogy as Anna’s sorrowing mother.

She’s the one who hands over the tickets to the group and it’s clear she thinks none of the three ever spent enough time with her daughter, so the pressure is on to make sure that they do their best in honouring her memory.

It doesn’t take long for the fissures and fractures in their relationships to appear. Kate and Cassie are extremely terse with one another, having once quarrelled over a man – Cassie’s ex-husband – and Cassie can’t help teasing Liz about her tendency to over-organise.

The itinerary follows the traditional lines of a British feel-good movie. They start in Paris and move on to Spain and Italy, shopping, dancing, getting drunk and falling briefly in love with men met along the way – Ben Miller and Franco Nero step in at this point. They successfully handle small crises brought on by snooty Parisian shop assistants, lost passports and train breakdowns. Liz, a GP, and Cassie, who stars as a nurse in an American TV soap, even manage to deliver a baby.

It’s predictable but cheery. Phillips, an assured feel-good performer best remembered for the advice she dispensed as Shazza in Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequels, is responsible for most of the laughs and Preston, a Meg Ryan look-alike, is glamorous and good-natured as the free-spirited Cassie, who tends to forget everything else when romance is in the offing.