Starring Timothy Spall. Rated PG

The seemingly enduring settlement of the Irish Troubles deserves a much better movie than it gets in The Journey, a poorly written two-hander that’s just as dull as its forgettable name.

The two, or we should say four, hands belong to Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall, playing Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness and Northern Ireland’s best-known demagogue, Ian Paisley, respectively. We know these bitter enemies buried the hatchet at a 2006 retreat in Scotland, but not quite how they did it. According to director Nick Hamm and screenwriter Colin Bateman, their film “imagines” what went on between the religious rivals.

Pictorializing this requires an increasingly preposterous series of contrivances. The central gimmick has Protestant firebrand Paisley attempting to return to Belfast for his 50th wedding anniversary—on the first night of the conference?—but being stuck in a castle near Glasgow because planes are grounded by an intense storm that appears to consist of pale sun with a little drizzle. (The film was actually shot in Northern Ireland.) This necessitates the two leaders taking a forced car ride to Edinburgh, with almost no security in tow, and only a hired driver (Freddie Highmore) to prime their conversation. Of course, he’s actually MI5, and taking Bluetooth orders from his chief (the late John Hurt), who helpfully includes an overview of Irish history in his earpiece briefings.

Also back at the castle is Prime Minister Tony Blair (Toby Stephens—maybe Michael Sheen wasn’t available), who explains to the grumbling left-behinds that this subterfuge was crucial to the cause of peace. The others—including Braveheart’s Catherine McCormack, reduced to a few expositional lines—are too polite to remind the PM that he is, at that very moment, poodling up to Bush in the pointless Iraq War.

These bits are brief, however, as most of the tale’s 90 minutes are devoted to that seemingly real-time car ride. The most interesting dialogue happens there, of course, although Star Trek veteran Meaney acts all folksy as the Catholic IRA man while Spall is stiff and theatrical behind heavy aging makeup and giant buckteeth. The filmmakers seem determined to distract us from their playlike approach by constantly introducing sillier reasons to get these guys out of the car. They may succeed, instead, in driving people out of the theatre.