Review of 'The Accidental Getaway Driver': OC Crime, Dramatized

Inspired by a story of true crimes of 2016, L. Lee's solid debut The main character is an unregistered taxi driver of 75 years of Vietnam who represses life in the shadows, giving strange walks in his mistreated badly Beige Camry. One night after 10 pm, Long (Hiep Tran Nghia) reluctantly accepts a person who calls desperately who promises to pay double. Putting a sports coat on its pajamas, Long stops an sidewalk and finds Tay (Dustin Nguyen), the Vietnamese speaker, plus two silent gross, Eddie (Phi Vu) and Aden (Dali Bensssalah), which muscle in his car and take care of everything: the seat arrangements, the outdoor air and its driver. They have just left the Male Central Prison of Santa Ana. Long is his now hostage and his escape media. But with the police looking for three men, not four, he is also his safeguard.

The names are fictitious, but the events are mostly real. (Lee and his writer Christopher Chen based on his script on an GQ article by Paul Kix and have reduced history instead of attacking it). You can feel the authenticity in the places and the lack of peculiarities of hero's action. Above all, you feel it in the simple fact that fugitives do not have much master plan.

Aden, the leader, uses the mask -shaped machismo of a father who does not want his children to know that things are not under control. As the four lead between the cheap California motels, a family dynamic arises: Aden, who once cut the penis of a victim, is the irritable patriarch; Eddie, a 20 -year -old gang murderer, is the impulsive child; And Tay, a sensitive man caught in drug trafficking, is the enriching empathic with a surprising gift for psychology. As for much, he is the dog that will be abandoned to the side of the road or humiliated.

This will not become a movie Geezer Gunslinger to Liam Neeson. But in the time of inactivity between the threats, while men fill the time as the news always conveniently updates the money of the reward for delivering the convicts, we learned that once it was a lieutenant colonel who fought next to the Americans in Vietnam. Lee and Chen's script is naturalistic, that is, most of Long's story was not said and there is simply on wrinkles on Nghia's face, but flashbacks give us glimpses of their years in a war of prisoners of war. In a grace note, the actor is also played as a young man, as if his oldest being was caught in his past. Lee is too subtle to say it out loud, but there is a silent irony in that long attempt to rebuild a life in the middle of the world just to finish in the same place: captive at the tip of gun.

Honestly, the script could be too silenced. Long is not willing to share much with his kidnappers. “Do I have to talk to you?” He truly tells Tay, who is not willing to do anything but driving. However, he also refers to having lost 20 years of his own life, and could not compensate for the missing decades of his wife and separate children. After reading Kix's original piece, I know that he refers to war, camp and the time he had to cross the ocean to his family's American house. But the sense of the time of the film feels vague and screwed.

Of course, poverty and loneliness are their own forms of imprisonment. Aden implies that Long should be on his side; The machine, cultural, economic, has crushed them both. (There is a good time when they both look impassively at a television huckster that preaches that poor people only need to sing: “I can, I will, I must”). Once, when Aden is in the midst of saying exactly how to behave, Lee takes us to Long's head and listen to gallimaties with damping. Maybe Long is too nervous to concentrate, maybe he is only tuning to Adén. Anyway, Aden can address everything he wants, but he can't understand much.

The film is full of scenes like this that pay our attention in their connection or lack of it: people who speak English in a long one, long speaking Vietnamese with them. (Sometimes, the script itself stumbles with the language chronically online: “I see you.” I am so tired. “

On the other hand, this ambiguity is related to how these escapes feel about this enigmatic strange in their midst. Nghia passes the film with her mouth agapia and wet and cloudy eyes behind thick prescription glasses. You can never change your pajamas. His long looks so confused that some part has to be an act, a way of making the gang relax, a decrepitude costume. But then we see scenes where Long's vulnerability also works against him. He only has an opportunity to ask for help, and his pleas come out so detail that it is easy to see how someone might think that the grandfather needs to be lying down.

The movie looks incredible. It must have been done for cents, but visual details have an impact. Among the credible and convincing places, I am partial to a shot where Long is put in a Weary Strip Mall and we see a bakery window full of model cakes. Photography director Michael Change Fernández crosses darkness as Caravaggio, using flashlights and headlights to get people out of the void and brilliant. Each of them, even for a moment, wins a flickering of humanity. Maybe not everyone deserves to escape from punishment. But these past lives overlook a focus of attention.