The French, bless their hearts, aren't afraid of releasing a film called Eyjafjallajokull (there's an on-screen pronunciation guide during the opening titles), but this good-natured if formulaic comedy has been retitled for release in English-speaking territories.
The mouthful of an Icelandic volcano that gives the film its original name is the most incidental of incidental characters. Its eruption grounds the flight on which Alain (Boon) and his ex, Valerie (Bonneton) are travelling to the wedding of their daughter on a Greek island. Cue a fraught road trip in which the pair make snarling travelling companions.
Director Coffre and his co-writers are painting by numbers here, and French audiences were lukewarm. Boon directed, wrote and starred in Welcome to the Sticks, the biggest French film of all time in France, but even his comic talent fails to raise this above the humdrum.
Quite a bit of money gets thrown around in scenes involving the motorway destruction of a Porsche and a light-plane air crash, but the script is really just a string of set pieces: she gets picked up by a Jesus freak; his bus is invaded by soccer hooligans; they land at a Romany fiesta in Albania. It's likeable enough but it breaks no new ground.
