The Journey

Even if the construct seems a tad forced, the winning performances make the excursion worthwhile.

The movie contains some tremendous individual scenes but the whole isn't better than the sum of its parts and, in the final analysis, it's a little disappointing.

While Hamm and Bateman have the right idea overall, their love of contrivance too often gives "The Journey" the sense of being reverse-engineered ...

A platitude-laden, sermonizing, and artless episode of "The Odd Couple."

The men's meeting serves the cause of Irish reunification, but the movie itself never coheres into anything believable.

The real-life version of how these two mortal enemies became so close that they were referred to in the press as 'The Chuckle Brothers' is way more interesting than the 'imagined' version presented in the film.

For viewing pleasure, it's hard to beat the verbal sparring between the avuncular Meaney and a more-Wormtail-than-Wormtail Spall.

There's really only one reason to see "The Journey" and that is the performances of Meaney and Spall. This heavily fictionalized account is, at best, a fantastical teleplay which bleeds credibility the further it progresses.

"The Journey" never loses sight of its goal to prove, especially in the age of parasitism, that talk doesn't sway opinions --it's listening.

Working with a smart, intelligent script Meany and Spall fence with one another in a way that is entirely believable. This does what movies should do; it educates and entertains at the same time.

I enjoyed watching Spall and Meaney and their verbal sparring, especially over issues of note.

The Journey doesn't add up to all that much; it's aggressively saccharine and lacks any real examination of the very important ideological disagreements between the two men at its center.