Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy script.
Wheelman premieres exclusively on Netflix on October 20.
Frank Grillo gets behind the wheel of a car, and for most of Jeremy Rush’s Wheelman, he never leaves. But this isn’t another low budget, one-location character study like Steven Knight’s Locke. Wheelman is Locke with a Glock, a high-concept car chase action-thriller that takes place mostly inside of a getaway car, for better and sometimes worse.
The driver, known only as Wheelman (Grillo), is working a run-of-the-mill bank job when, right after his passengers start pulling the heist, he gets a mysterious phone call, ordering him to steal the money. The thieves are going to kill him, or so he’s been told, so he waits until the cash is in the trunk and then he takes off, no longer knowing who to trust.
Wheelman calls his handler, he calls his wife, he calls his daughter, he calls the mysterious voice that got him in this mess in the first place. He calls a heck of lot of people over the course of writer/director Jeremy Rush’s film. It’s a pretty economical way to make a low-budget action movie, devoting most the running time to dialogue that sounds important. But after a while it feels like we’re just watching a radio play. Or worse, like we’re watching Frank Grillo listen to a radio play.
Fortunately, the conservation of resources sometimes pays off. The action in Wheelman makes an impact, every time it finally comes around. There’s one crash in particular that looks like it was filmed by accident, and if you didn’t know better you might think someone really died. (Uh… we do know better, right? Has anyone actually checked in on that?) And the climactic car chase goes in an original direction, at least for a while, injecting some nitrous oxide into an otherwise standard cinematic transmission.
At first glance it might look like Frank Grillo is carrying Wheelman entirely by himself, but although Grillo in nearly every scene - often by himself - this is Jeremy Rush’s movie. When it works, it works because Jeremy Rush and his production team have found the right balance between low-fi production and high-quality action. When it stalls, it stalls because his rambling screenplay feels like it’s just filling time instead of spending it wisely.
Too much of Wheelman features Frank Grillo, doing the best he can with the material (which is a lot), driving aimlessly around town, making phone call after phone call, trying to figure out what exactly is going on. And what, exactly, is going on isn’t nearly mind-blowing enough to be treated like a major mystery. Keeping the Wheelman at arm’s length from the plot, for most of the film, makes it harder to become emotionally invested - for the protagonist and for the audience - because explaining the plot isn’t nearly as interesting than engaging with it head on, or dealing with other characters on a personal level and acting accordingly.
The Verdict
The selling point of Wheelman, the idea of a car chase movie that takes place almost entirely within a car, makes Jeremy Rush’s film novel but it also makes it rattle a bit. Wheelman’s strengths and failings are the direct result of its very concept, making it an interesting and sometimes exciting experiment, but not an altogether successful one.
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