Movie Review: The Long Way Down - Director's Cut

Yesterday evening, I and about 100 or so sat at the local mall's theater to watch the director's cut of the film "The Long Way Down". See link to prior posting describing the film: LINK

The film had its amusing/comedic moments, mainly driven by the spoken commentary between Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman as they motored along Africa's sometimes quite bad "roads", more like trails sometimes.

For instance: They chanced to meet a bicyclist who's going around the world on pedal power alone, using a motorcycle obviously when on land but using a pedal boat for Christ's sake when crossing intervening large water barriers. Now that's a serious bicyclist. Anyways, as the man departed, Ewan is sitting on his R1200GS loaded to the gills with gear, he turns to Charlie and says: "So, how much of a pussy do you feel like now, Charlie?" The whole crowd of us burst out laughing.

There were many shots of their GS's going down in the extremely poor road conditions they had to endure, mostly it was Ewan's motorcycle doing the crashing as Charlie had his Dakar experience to help him along but even he dropped it on occasion I think.

Some really beautiful scenery served as backdrops and side shots of the trip, much footage of the people they met along the way and the truly primitive conditions they live under, and a couple of instances of recounting of massacres that happened under that poor continent's continuing tribal warfare.

Ewans wife, Eve joins them for a small part of the ride, on a 650GS I believe. She was quite the trooper, only recently having learned how to ride a motorcycle! There was footage of some of her crashes, which did not discourage her as it would have me, she always got up and rode on.

Throughout the film there was the "trip diary" entries of each rider's impressions of events, their thoughts on stuff, all mostly in HD which was a bit disconcerting since they sometimes tended to hold the cameras real close to their faces!

To me it was amusing to see Charlie's reactions when he was asked to not do wheelies by the guys in the support crew in order to decrease risks. He does fine for a while but then apparently something lets loose and there's footage of him doing it repeatedly. : )

This film was only two hours so I only saw bits and pieces of the series that starts 02AUG I believe on Fox Reality Channel, it's worth a look on your part.