The “accidental getaway driver” is a meditative approach to the kidnapping saga

In 2016, three men escaped from a prison in Orange county, and then, from the options, they called a taxi. The driver who presented was an elderly Vietnamese, Long Mã, a divorced war veteran, which they kidnapped and kept hostage during a one -week or captive or captivating. by capturing hiding in the chambers of the motel in southern California.

The experience was elaborated in a GQ 2017 article By Paul Kix, the “accidental get away driver”, which described the unique connection that he formed with Bac Duong, one of his kidnappers, a national Vietnamese and the terror he experienced in Hossein Nayeri, The Ringleader. This wild story has now been brought to the screen by the co-writer/director Sing J. Lee, in a lyrical and meditative adaptation that focuses on the mood and feeling, rather than on action-oriented suspense.

There is an excellent ignorance of the first moments of the “accidental getaway driver”. The extraction of concrete and traffic lights indicate that we are in Orange County, and the Vietnamese spoken everywhere allows us to know that we are in the OC enclus known as Little Saigon. Long me, played with a soul that ends with Hiep Tranghia, responds to the call for a walk, but the old man does not want to work so late and tries to refuse. Tây (Dustin Nguyen) convinces him that it is a short trip and will pay double, so he raises the three men, who then ask for more and more stops. When he protests, Tây pulls a weapon on him. The trip is just beginning.

Lee’s approach on the material is to focus on performance and tone, and in particular the relationship between Tây (the character based on Bac Duong) and Long, which appears as the two Vietnamese men begin to share their life stories with each other. During the long lengths of stopping while hiding and trying to realize the next move. Tây protects his old man from Skitth, the young Eddie (Phi Vu) and the psychopath (Dali Benslah), who boasts the older man about his crimes, which includes torture and mutilate a man in the desert.

The cinema Michael Fernandez brings a texture and tactility to this story about the crime, surprising the inadvertent beauty of this raw, unrecognized frame: faces bathed in the brilliance of brake lights and signs of the Neon Convention Store; Motel rooms in a realistic way and cigarette smoke that spin in the back seat of an old corolle.

Rather than to attract the details of these three crimes of escaped prisoners, Lee and Christopher Chen co-writer focus on Long’s subjective experience. All we know about them is what he does: we get information about their past in warm conversations with Tây or through a threatening monologue from Aden. Eddie remains a bit of a figure until the group sees her mother and sister in the news and breaks down.

Often, we are taken in Long’s dream memories: fragments from his childhood in Vietnam, aqueous, confused memories of his lost marriage and family, some abstract, surrealist images, which gests his past, but does not reveal much. The intention is to stay in his inner world as he goes through this extreme event, but although he is beautiful and poetic, he is also somewhat abstained and feels in conflict with the impulse of the bigger story.

The “accidental escapade driver” tries not to elucidate the facts of this true crime story, but rather to imagine Long’s mood during her, which is emotionally evocative, but prevents the viewing experience as the film stops to stop to do. The shows, especially from Nguyen, Benssalah and Nghia, move, but feel that the film loses steam under its own conception, despite the richness and narrative richness of the material at hand.