Wheelman

Dir: Jeremy Rush

2017

****

Steven Knight’s 2013 Locke was a remarkable film that showed just what could be achieved with a simple script and a single set. It stared Tom Hardy as Ivan Locke, a successful construction manager who receives a couple of phones calls while on route to a job that look as if they could destroy both his career and his private life. Through nothing more than continuous dialogue and the inside of a car, Knight and Hardy delivered a remarkable thriller and the door was left open for anyone brave enough to follow in their footsteps. Enter Jeremy Rush. Locke was remarkable due to its main character and his situation being somewhat unremarkable – he made something compelling about a subject that is not particularly interesting to anyone uninvolved. Rush takes a slightly easier road (excuse the pun) and makes the story and main character a little more mysterious. Where Locke’s car was just a prop, Wheelman’s car is almost a character in itself. We can see everything happening from the car and at times, it seems we are watching through the car, as if it is its own entity. Our Wheelman is a getaway driver, a talented one, so even though this is a one-man show with theatrical monologue, it is also a great action film. Locke was a slow-burner, Wheelman kicks off immediately and is compelling viewing from the offset. Frank Grillo is perfectly cast as the getaway driver caught between mob fractions, a disloyal friend and his estranged wife and daughter. Generally watching a film that feels somewhat like a video game is a bad thing but the opposite is true here. Like Hardy’s Locke, Grillo’s Wheelman is totally believable and his situation isn’t beyond the realms of reality – it could happen to a guy in his line of work. The film’s twists and turns aren’t too heavy handed either, believable but utterly unpredictable. The format never gets boring either, although they cheat ever so slightly by letting the Wheelman out of the car for a segment but this is more than made up for with an extra twist at the end, which I found quite rewarding. The cinematography is spectacular, just as good as Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in places and certainly with more pizzazz than Locke with each window used as a point of view with very few tricks played on the viewers perception. Grillo plays it so cool, he is utterly convincing as the Wheelman and he belongs to a group of very few actors who can deliver a brilliant performance while driving. It certainly had the effect that I believe Rush was going for and I thought it was brilliant. However, I can’t help but think it could have been improved with a few long shots. I don’t mean long shot as in distance, I mean long shots as in time length. I saw Wheelman as an example of evolution, with films such as Bullitt, Vanishing Point, The Driver and The Getaway (and even Dirty Mary Crazy Larry in some respects) being its elder relatives and the one thing that all of those films had was that long shot where the camera just kept filming as our driver just kept going. It’s the sort of shot that makes producers nervous and the sort of thing modern editors seem incapable of, but if Wheelman just had a couple of little moments to itself I think it could have been a perfect movie. As it is though it is just brilliant, a pleasant surprise for sure.