Review: ‘The Accidental Getaway Driver’ is a real-life thriller that’s comfortable in the slow lane

Inspired by a 2016 true-crime story, Sing L. Lee’s strong debut “The Accidental Getaway Driver” is a human-sized thriller set across several blue-black nights off the grid in Orange County. The main character is a 75-year-old unregistered taxi driver from Vietnam who scrapes together a living in the shadows, giving strangers rides in his battered beige Camry. One night after 10 p.m., Long (Hiep Tran Nghia) reluctantly agrees to chauffeur a desperate caller who promises to pay double. Slinging a sports coat over his pajamas, Long pulls up to a curb and finds Tay (Dustin Nguyen), the Vietnamese speaker, plus two silent brutes, Eddie (Phi Vu) and Aden (Dali Benssalah), who muscle into his car and take over everything: the seating arrangements, the air freshener and their driver. They’ve just broken out of Santa Ana’s Men’s Central Jail. Long is their now hostage and their means of escape. But with the cops looking for three men — not four — he’s their safeguard, too.

The names are fictional but the events are mostly real. (Lee and his co-screenwriter Christopher Chen based their script on a GQ article by Paul Kix and have pared the story down instead of jazzing it up.) You can feel the authenticity in the locations and the lack of action-hero quirks. Most of all, you feel it in the simple fact that the fugitives don’t have much of a master plan.

Aden, the ringleader, wears the mask-like machismo of a father who doesn’t want his kids to know that things aren’t under control. As the four of them drive between cheap California motels, a familial dynamic emerges: Aden, who once severed a victim’s penis, is the irritable patriarch; Eddie, a 20-year-old gang murderer, is the impulsive child; and Tay, a sensitive man caught up in the drug trade, is the nurturing empath with a surprising gift for psychology. As for Long, he’s the dog who will either be abandoned on the side of the road or put down.

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This will not become a geezer gunslinger movie à la Liam Neeson. But in the downtime between threats, while the men fill time as the news always conveniently updates us on the reward money for turning in the convicts, we learn that Long was once a lieutenant colonel who fought alongside the Americans back home in Vietnam. Lee and Chen’s script is naturalistic — i.e., most of Long’s back story goes unsaid and exists simply in the wrinkles in Nghia’s face — but flashbacks give us glimpses of his years in a prisoner-of-war camp. In a grace note, the actor plays himself as a young man, too, as though his older self is still stuck in his past. Lee’s too subtle to say it out loud, but there’s a hushed irony in that Long attempted to rebuild a life halfway around the world only to wind up in the same place: captive at gunpoint.

Honestly, the script might be a bit too muted. Long isn’t willing to share much with his abductors. “Do I have to talk to you?” he says truculently to Tay, unwilling to do anything more than drive. Yet, he does refer to having lost 20 years of his own life, too, and was unable to make up the missing decades to his estranged wife and children. Having read Kix’s original reported piece, I know that he means the war, the camp and the time it took to get across the ocean to his family’s American home. But the film’s sense of time feels vague and screwy.

Dustin Nguyen, left, and Hiep Tran Nghia in the movie “The Accidental Getaway Driver.”

(Thunder Road Films)

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’s a nice moment when the two stare impassively at a television huckster who preaches that poor folks just need to chant: “I can, I will, I must.”) Aden’s kind of logic might have swayed Bonnie over to Clyde, but Lee is aware of the language barrier that keeps them at odds. Once, when Aden’s in the middle of telling Long exactly how to behave, Lee takes us inside Long’s head and we hear muffled gibberish. Maybe Long is too jumpy to focus, maybe he’s just tuning Aden out. Either way, Aden can grandstand all he wants, but he can’t make Long understand.

The film is full of scenes like this that put our attention on their connection or lack of it: people talking English at Long, Long talking Vietnamese at them. (Sometimes the script itself stumbles into speaking the language of the chronically online: “I see you.” “I’m so tired.”) For a while, this question of how much anyone understands about each other feels like a sticky mystery, until you accept that it’s not going to lead up to any big reveal — the climax is purely, movingly emotional.

Then again, that ambiguity ties into how these escapees feel about this enigmatic stranger in their midst. Nghia spends the film with his mouth agape and his eyes wet and bleary behind thick prescription glasses. He never gets to change out of his pajamas. His Long looks so confused that some piece of it has to be an act — a way to get the gang to relax — a costume of decrepitude. But then we see scenes where Long’s vulnerability works against him, too. He only gets one chance to ask for help, and his pleas come out so haltingly that it’s easy to see how someone might just think that Grandpa needs to be put to bed.

The film looks incredible. It must have been made for pennies, but the visual details have impact. Among the credible, compelling locations, I’m partial to a shot where Long pulls into a weary strip mall and we see a bakery window crowded with model cakes. Cinematographer Michael Cambio Fernandez cuts through the darkness like Caravaggio, using flashlights and headlights to pull people out of the void and into the bright. Every one of them, even for a moment, earns a flicker of humanity. Maybe they don’t all deserve to escape punishment. But these otherwise overlooked lives deserve a spotlight.