Wheelman

 Wheelman (2017) is a modestly entertaining crime film directed by Jeremy Rush and produced by Netflix.  The picture is only 82 minutes long, inconsequential, and very cheaply made.  

In the film, Frank Grillo plays an unnamed "wheelman"or get-away driver. He's an ex-con and needs cash to pay off debts incurred in supporting his family (he has an ex-wife and 13-year old daughter) while his was in the pen.  So the driver agrees to transport two thugs to a nighttime robbery at a bank.  (The bank is lit up and full of people -- it looks like a gallery reception.  Since when are banks open at night?  This is the first of many incongruities that seriously mar the picture.)  While the robbery is underway, the driver gets a cell-phone call telling him to have the gunmen put the dough in the trunk so that he can, then, abandon them on the street outside the bank.  The driver is working for the local mob, but the "guys from Philly" are trying to infiltrate the city (also unnamed although I think it's supposed to be Boston), and the cell-phone call represents an attempt to intervene and humiliate the native crooks.  This leads to a double chase:  the driver attempts to elude the Philly gunmen who want to hijack the job and steal the stolen money; at the same time, the local mobsters are chasing the Philly criminals and trying to rub them out.  After some confrontations and shoot-outs, the wheelman lures the Philly gangsters into an ambush and they are exterminated by the local mob.  And, so, the film ends happily, the local mob rewarding the wheelman for his doughty assistance by forgiving his debts.  

The filmmaker devised the movie to be shot entirely from the perspective of the get-away driver, featuring tight interior close-ups in the car, lots of gear-shifting and braking in close-up (a little like the shots you get in a concert movie of the virtuoso's fingers on the keyboard), footage taken through the windshield, and exterior shots with the camera mounted about six inches above or beside the speeding car.  The opening sequence, for instance, is shot entirely from within the get-away car as it is parked in dark garage and, then, brought out onto the street so that the driver can take command of the vehicle.  But this austere program for the film proves to be too confining and claustrophobic and, so, the movie, in fact, violates its own rules with several sequences shot remote from the get-away car.  And, toward the end of the movie, the battered car is replaced by a shiny Porsche.  (This vehicle is owned by the ex-con; exactly how he can afford a lavish sports car of this sort is left unexplained).  Complicating the action is the hero's 13-year old daughter who has, apparently, been taught to drive by her dad on a "track".  She is very precocious and has to drive at high speeds for a few minutes in the picture.  (As it happens, I just watched The Nice Guys which also features a precocious 13-year old girl and a bitchy ex-wife -- The Nice Guys is a much better picture, but, in both cases, the device of ginning up the suspense by putting a young girl in harm's way is a little cynical and, even, unpleasant.)  Nothing in the movie makes much sense.  The city streets where the action takes place are wholly empty.  Yet, we know from dialogue that the film takes place in real-time between about 8:30 pm and 10:00 pm and so it's bizarre that there is never any traffic anywhere.  In one scene, there's a stand-off in a long tunnel, apparently the tunnel system created by the "Big Dig" at Boston -- the hero just parks his car in the tunnel and, with a couple exceptions, there's no traffic at all.  The whole film could be brought to a swift conclusion if any one of the idiotic gunsels aimed at the tires on the get-away car.  But despite fusillades of bullets, no tire is ever hit.  The poor getaway car takes a beating but keeps on ticking -- despite many crashes it seems to drive perfectly fine as if, somehow, invulnerable.  Several scenes take place in parking garages, strange places that don't seem to require that you pay to park or exit.  For some reason, implausibility is highly destructive to crime films and this movie seems to have been written with no regard for reality.  Frank Grillo is apparently a well-known actor with rugged good-looks, a bit like a younger Sylvester Stallone.  He's pretty good in this movie. From his bio, it seems that he specializes in comic book films.