The review
I almost didn't watch this. The reviews Google puts front and center are bad: 32% on Rotten Tomatoes from 19 critics at the time of writing, 49 on Metacritic. Then I had a feeling and checked deeper. The user reviews were a different movie: people enjoyed it. The one negative user review I did read complained that the movie talks about soldiers with PTSD but never about the people they fought, and that told me more about the reviewer than about the movie. So we went.
Here's the thing to know going in: this is basically a car chase movie. I came in without knowing that and still went out happy, but set your expectations there. There isn't much of a plot. It's a driving action movie with a personal journey in the driver's seat, and a message I happen to care about: veterans need to be treated better. This movie delivers just enough heart along with the action that I left the cinema in a better mood than I came in.
The driving is great and the stunts are great. There was a point in the movie where I thought: I like this better than the recent Fast & Furious films. Those got so over the top. This one stays grounded (Waifu's math: 80 percent of it could happen in real life, and she's not a car person either). The director, Mark Vanselow, doubled Neeson for thirty films before this one, and it shows in the right places. The non-driving action is old school, shaky camera and all, especially when Neeson is struggling hand to hand. But he's an old actor, so what are you gonna do? The car is beautiful, says a man who doesn't know what the car is.
And then there's Helene, the car's AI. My first thought was that this film got made a few years too late, because its AI isn't as smart as the AI we have now. But that's why she works as a supporting role, and Neeson chatting and joking with her is the most fun I had during the movie. The public cheering him on from their TVs was a nice touch too: the guy warning "roadblock ahead", the truck drivers misleading the cops. One critic calls that angle underdeveloped. I don't think it is, and going deeper would have been unnecessary. Again: car chase.
It did bother me a bit that there's a lot of tell, not show. The news segments tell you Todd was investigated for this, the Texas police chief for that, and you take their word for it. That said, I can't think of a better way for a movie whose whole focus is driving. And you can't be too analytical. They block roads perfectly and leave one access road open, small stuff like that. Just go for the ride. The cast makes that easy: Neeson doing Neeson, which I'm a fan of; Marisa Tomei with real chemistry opposite him; Ving Rhames as Tanker, not much screen time, but when he's there he adds value; Michael Chiklis as Major Pope, a caricature of an angry Texas cop, and I enjoyed him for it. Todd, the man who started all this, we barely see, and I don't think we're supposed to care. He's there to give the chase a reason.
The scene that hit me hardest has no car in it. Fang is at the end of the road, ready to shoot himself, and Tara calls. What follows is a lot of good cast chemistry: the way a husband and wife who have known each other forever, had a falling out, and are reaching for each other in a bad hour actually talk. Cryptic, but only in the way two people who know each other that well can be. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but when he says he has a destination, I think the destination is Wiz, the comrade he lost in Afghanistan. The clue was planted earlier, at the bar: "Do you ever wanna go out in a blaze of glory?" Tara can see he's about to, and you watch her work out what to say. Everybody in the movie keeps saying he's not a man who gives up, and she's the one who reads that right: instead of telling him to stop, she gives him somewhere new to drive to. From that moment his destination changes, from the grave to the beach. He'd been saying the beach was the plan all along, and in a sense that was a lie; it only became true once he stopped being lost, after that call. Best scene in it. The ending, by the way, is never shown. They leave the beach to your imagination, and I think that's the right call. Waifu wanted to see them all together, then agreed it would have been too predictable. We're just glad he got away.
The music is nothing spectacular, but it does its job and never gets in the way (unlike Disclosure Day, where it was so distracting I remember it more than the film). The audio design and the cinematography are good, though: not hard to follow, and fun to watch. At 99 minutes it's a good compact movie that never drags.
I almost let nineteen critics decide this one for me. I'm glad I took the back roads instead: a 7 I enjoyed, a wife who scored it an 8, and a car that talks back.
The Mongoose: the critics blocked the interstate and forgot the access road.
