Any coming-of-age story bearing the name Driving Lessons is sure to include a road trip. Evie drags the reluctant Ben out of his stifling household and ultimately out of his shell by tricking him into taking her camping, where she commits him to stay overnight by swallowing the car keys. "We'll have them back in the morning," she says. "I'm as regular as clockwork." The rest of their misadventures hit all the rite-of-passage stops: confronting authority figures, losing virginity, finding identity.
We've taken this trip before, but even though the scenery is the same, half of what makes a road trip is the traveling companions. Grint has played the awkward comic-relief sidekick in too many Potter films to screw it up now, and though Evie can be overly abrasive at times, Walters still gets all the best razor-edged lines. So even though the coming-of-age concept ran out of gas years ago, Driving Lessons still (barely) manages to get where it's going on the fumes of lukewarm sentimentality and a chuckle or two.