Writer-director Brendan Grant (Tonight Is Cancelled) is not after tidy endings where characters learn important life lessons. That’s not the way the world works – it’s more a rambling, sometimes-uneventful journey that can double back on itself and doesn’t offer easy answers. People don’t always do the right thing. In this respect Grant has probably delivered the film he set out to make. The loose, easy-going atmosphere can hinder engagement at crucial moments but it is seductive.
Set over one day in Dublin, Get Up & Go follows twenty-something Coilin (Scott) and Alex (Coonan) as they attempt to get their life in order. Musician Alex has just been told by girlfriend Sinead (McCall) that she’s pregnant, just as he was planning to move to London. This news doesn’t alter Alex’s plans; in fact it speeds them up, and he spends the rest of the day hunting down money to pay for the ferry across the water. Budding comedian Coilin meanwhile has just been fired from his printing job but is more concerned with wooing Lola (Devereaux), his exaggerated feelings the product of a one-night stand that she has long forgotten.
Grant approaches the romantic comedy/bromance from a different angle. His heroes veer between drippy slackers and unlikeable narcissists. Credit to Coonan and his assured smirk that keeps the cocksure Alex oddly likeable despite horrifying levels of self-regard; he goes about trying to seduce Lola, who isn’t only Coilin’s dream girl but also his pregnant girlfriend’s sister. Meanwhile, good guy Coilin, something of Joseph Gordon-Levitt/John Cusack hopeless romantic, later makes decisions that your typical romantic hero wouldn’t. This is all refreshing and welcome.
While Get Up & Go doesn’t kick on when it’s expected to, Grant does make it easy to slip into the relaxed groove, so easy in fact that the air of post-recession disaffection sneaks in under the radar. But it’s there. It’s hard to pinpoint but it’s in the fabric of the film: it’s in Alex’s disconnection, in Coilin’s pessimism. The Dublin streets don’t sparkle the way they did in another recent 24-hour Dublin comedy, Standby – the capital here looks deliberately drab and dull with exterior scenes usually taking place in alleyways.