Ed Harris, as renowned photographer Ben Ryder, is worth the price of admission to this movie. Ben is dying of cancer, but Harris obviously relishes how crusty, blunt, and often offensive Ben is. Ben blackmails his long estranged son Matt, into coming on a road trip with him to get some old film rolls developed at a Kodak factory in Kansas.
Don't know why they don't just fly!!
I think Jason Sudeikis is too intense to play Matt, but he is a good actor. Matt is often as nasty and dysfunctional as Ben. His simmering anger that his father abandoned him as a child, to travel the world as a photojournalist, is understandable. However the father-son schtick does sometimes get a bit heavy. The go-between is Ben's paid carer, Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) whose character, I felt, was too much the 'hot but shallowly written' love interest. She spends most of the film batting her eyelids and flicking her hair. There's never any doubt that she and Matt will end up together. But before that, some of her scenes berating both Ben and Matt for abusing each other, and urging them to make peace, are effective.
The death scenes are handled movingly, and the final scene of viewing the newly developed slides, showing Matt as a child, with Ben (in the photos) looking on, are nicely done.
It's all a little bit slight, though. 'Dad and son don't talk, Dad and son go on road trip. Dad and son make up. Dad dies. The End'.
I think this movie means well. But it's far from excellent.
Review of Kodachrome
