‘The Last Bus’ Review: Even a Committed Timothy Spall Can’t Enliven This Lifeless Drama

variety.com:

Tomris Laffly Gentle is the most fitting word to describe the aura of “The Last Bus,” Gillies MacKinnon’s placid travelogue of a movie about an ailing Englishman on a heartrending mission.

Sadly, the filmmaker’s road trip errs on the side of excessive gentleness. For a tender movie that follows an old man on a long and demanding multi-bus excursion to honor his late wife’s wishes, the placid affair has curiously little emotional range, and an even narrower sense of stakes.Playing the retired engineer Tom, the British gentleman in question, a believably aged Timothy Spall gives the character his all, infusing him with a palpable sense of countryside dignity, but perhaps leaning a bit heavily on an exaggeratedly old speech pattern mostly made up of breathy mumblings.

Respectably clad and holding onto his deceased wife Mary’s ashes for dear life, Tom leaves his John o’ Groats home — a location on Scotland’s northernmost point — and heads to Land’s End in the southwest England (a nearly 850-mile journey, according to Google Maps), using nothing but buses.

Through a number of pretty-ish but painfully unimaginative and overtly costume-y flashbacks to the 1950s, we get to understand that the young Mary and Tom (played by Natalie Mitson and Ben Ewing, respectively) left their Land’s End home when an unspeakable family tragedy struck.