"Downhill" (The Guardian 30/05/14)

Downhill **

Dir: James Rouse. With: Richard Lumsden, Ned Dennehy, Jeremy Swift. 98 mins. Cert: 15

Adland maven James Rouse treads a well-trodden path in his feature debut by following a quartet of middle-aged blokes on Wainwright’s Coast-to-Coast Walk through the Lakes. From its faux- vérité shooting style to its recognisable small-screen faces, its reference points are almost entirely televisual, though – despite the game cast’s improvised efforts – it never once approaches that funny, revealing territory The Trip, for one, has entered in tracking the effects of looming mortality on the male psyche. Instead, it rambles on, in ways both lit. and fig.: a grey, farty plod, with increasingly little to sustain it bar the scenery. 

Downhill opens in selected cinemas from today.