Based on the true story of a Vietnamese-American taxi driver who was briefly held hostage by three escaped convicts in Orange County, California, “The Accidental Getaway Driver” is hugely influenced by the crime thrillers of Michael Mann—”Collateral” and “Thief” especially—with crystalline widescreen nighttime photography and off-centered closeups of faces lost in thought.
However, it is significantly smaller and quieter than anything else the master has produced; it is, in essence, a stage play on wheels with a lengthy excursion into a motel room. Long Ma, a cab driver played by Vietnamese actor Hiep Tran Nghia, who only started acting at the age of 50!, is the elderly and reserved main character. During the war, he was a colonel. However, this is not the kind of "badass old guy" movie in which the hero is misunderstood due to his age but proves to be quite capable of climbing rain gutters, dropping through skylights, and slitting throats.
This is a psychological drama about the missed opportunities, painful losses, and mortifying mistakes that people carry around with them throughout their days, and that weigh on them even when guns aren’t pointed at their faces.
Long Ma, like poor Dante in "Clerks," was not even scheduled to work that day. He got a call on his cell phone while shopping late at night and had to be convinced by the dispatcher to accept the job and pick up the rider. Aden Salhi (Dali Benssalah), a potentially unstable hardass, Tay Du'o'ng (Dustin Nguyen), a likable and insinuating character, and baby-faced Eddie Ly (Phi Vu) are the three riders. To go...well, do they even know what they're doing, they climb into Long Ma's old car. It's understandable that the details are sketchy. However, Long Ma quickly realizes that he is a hostage and is unsure of what to do about it.
There’s a particular sort of Western that “The Accidental Getaway Driver” might remind you of, if you’re into that movie genre: the wilderness adventure in which criminals take innocent people hostage while going from Point A to Point B, and since the hostages cannot liberate themselves through force of numbers or firepower, they instead try to get into their captors’ heads and underneath their skins and manipulate them into liking them or realizing how much they dislike each other (sowing discord). Long Ma isn’t purposeful and calculating in that way. However, the individual conversations he has with his passengers, which initially stall out due to machismo and silence codes, serve a similar purpose: they establish genuine connections that remind the passengers of their shared humanity.
The closeups of one of the criminals as he looks at, listens to, or just thinks about Long Ma are some of the best parts of the movie. You can see on their faces that they are avoiding thinking of this old man as anything other than, well, collateral. Sing J., making his directorial debut, Lee (who also cowrote the script, with Christopher Chen) proves he has a steady hand with visuals and performances. It's clear that this is a filmmaker who knows what he likes and wants, and he knows how to connect with his coworkers, such as cinematographer Michael Fernandez, who is an expert at using negative space. Even though it was a small production, this is one of those rare productions that evokes a feeling of grandeur. The result is thoughtful, honorable and sometimes moving, though there may not actually be enough gas in this movie’s tank, narratively speaking, to justify even its comparatively brief running time. It takes too long to get into gear. In addition, despite being gallery-ready in terms of lighting and blocking, some of the more extended pauses or formally rigorous compositions, get in the way of the performances unintentionally (like a conversation in a hotel room in the dark, where you can only see the rectangles of the windows to the outside, not the room itself). This is an ambitious first film that is impressive in its ability to create an entire world with its own atmosphere and drop the viewer right into it. However, in the end, it feels more like a promise or a concept than a freestanding object that you will want to revisit in order to uncover all of the subtleties you missed the first time around. Its greatest asset is its performances, which operate in strikingly different registers (some more subtle or ‘naturalistic’ and others more heightened) yet somehow work together to further the film’s story and themes.
Hiep Tran Nghia is the standout, existing onscreen rather than performing in some obvious sense. The biggest difference between stage acting and film acting is that the latter is an act of in-the-moment collaboration with artists who are actively adjusting to each other’s creativity; as one veteran actor explained it to me, sometimes the best kind of movie performance is one where the actor understands what everyone else is doing and opens up emotionally and intellectually to become sort of a human canvas that the other artists can imprint themselves on. That’s the kind of work he’s doing in “The Accidental Getaway Driver.” I don't think he meant to steal the movie, but that's what happens, in keeping with the title. I like to believe that he simply forgot about it and put it in his back pocket.
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