500 Miles review – kids hit the road to visit Irish grandad Bill Nighy in YA tearjerker

Nighy is the Dingle dwelling grandfather of a Sheffield family in strife in sentimental adaptation of Mark Lowery’s novel Charlie and Me This, sadly, is not a biopic of the Proclaimers, but a family tearjerker adapted from Charlie and Me, Mark Lowery’s novel for older children, an adventure about a teenage boy who runs away from home with his little brother to go to their grandad’s. It’s a sentimental film that requires a cast of fine actors to squelch through some fairly heavy slush. Among them, Bill Nighy as the grandad seems to suffer from some kind of reverse Samson effect with a rugged beard that might be to blame for his charisma dip. The film switches between time periods. In the present, teenager Finn (Roman Griffin Davis) runs away after overhearing his separating parents (Clare Dunne and Michael Socha) arguing about who gets which child in the split. Finn takes his scampish younger brother Charlie (Dexter Sol Ansell), and off they set on a 500-mile trip from Sheffield to Dingle on the west coast of Ireland where their grandad John (Nighy) lives. On the voiceover, Finn explains his brother was born very prematurely, leaving him with long-term health conditions –