The Driver (2019)

In our goal of getting Mark Dacascos into the 30 Club by the end of the year, and in my attempt to take advantage of the cheap Starz subscription I've got right now, and considering I'd been meaning to do this one for a while anyway, I figured it was time to finally make it happen. Also, the screenplay was written by a fellow Pear Tree, so I have to support that. 

The Driver has DTVC Hall of Famer Mark Dacascos as "The Driver," also known as "Dad," a guy with a certain set of skills who works as the driver and head of security for a small community of people who have barricaded themselves against the zombie apocalypse. When things go sideways, The Driver has to escape with his daughter Bree (Noelani Dacascos). His plan is to take her to a place called "Haven," a possible myth, but also a possible safe zone where more humans are living away from the zombies. The thing working against him: he's been bitten, and only has so much time before he turns. This means he needs to take as much advantage of the time he has left to show his daughter how to take care of herself after he's no longer there.

This is Wych Kaos at his most Kaos-ian, which I think contributes to the low IMDb user rating despite me enjoying it. It's got action elements, it's got zombie elements, but then it has this human drama element that Kaosayananda really wants the movie to be about, and I don't even know that he wants to package the human element inside a zombie actioner, I think this is how he wants the movie to be. And the thing is, it all worked for me, but I think that's because I'd been seeing more of his work, not only as a director but a cinematographer, where I think he really earns his money, and I think because of that I have a better sense of how he wants to make a movie. The thing is though, how do you package that? You have Mark Dacascos in a great performance, but he's known for his next-level martial arts ability, not for acting opposite his real life daughter and playing a father who knows he's going to die soon and is teaching her how to shoot a gun. I think if people know going in that there's some of the Mark Dacascos action star, but overall it's more a dramatic role, at the very least fans of his would watch this and appreciate what he, Kaos, and everyone else were trying to do, and even if that's a slim audience, sometimes it's about making the movie you want to make and letting the audience come to it instead of thinking about the audience ahead of time. (Easy for me to say though, I'm not dealing with the savage reviews on IMDb after putting myself out there.)

We're now at 27 films for Mr. Dacascos, and out of those, this doesn't reach the highs of a Drive or Crying Freeman, and I'd probably put something like Sabotage above it too--though we get a callback to that movie when Dacascos is showing his daughter how to shoot with a scope, and he tells her to keep it away from her to avoid the "idiot cut"--but I thought his performance was a better realization of what he and Kaos were going for in One Night in Bangkok. Kaos really leans on Dacascos to make this movie work, and the sense I got in watching him was that Dacascos relished the opportunity to be leaned on like that. The other thing I thought he did a good job of was divorcing himself from his character, even though he was acting opposite his real life wife and daughter. There were moments where he had to pull from that reservoir to get the emotion he needed out, but this character is not exactly a good guy, and as the movie unfolds his humanity is revealed, which wins us over, but it's a strange alchemy that we don't generally get in a movie like this, and Dacascos had to work to walk that tightrope to make it a success. As I said above, if you're a fan of Dacascos you need to see this, and while it may not be a favorite, you'll at least appreciate the performance.

This is the fourth film Wych Kaosayananda's directed that we've reviewed on the site, with another three films of his that he was cinematographer as well, and I think it's that acumen as a cinematographer that makes his films so interesting. There are moments where he's literally telling the story through his cinematography, which is something I picked up on more here than in the other films of his I've watched, and like One Night in Bangkok, Dacascos is good at performing in these scenes where there isn't any dialog, and Kaos is using his cinematography to advance the plot. I went back to my reviews of the other three directed films of his we've covered, which in addition to One Night in Bangkok are Tekken 2 and Zero Tolerance, and I found that I wasn't as hard on them, especially the latter two, as I'd thought, so maybe by this fourth one I was primed to watch his movies and understand better his unique perspective to filmmaking. 

Another interesting element to this film is it was supposed to be the third film of a planned trilogy, of which the first film, Paradise Z, came out a year later, and the second film, The Rider, hasn't been shot yet, and isn't even listed as an in development credit for him on IMDb. What that means is, at the end when he's tying the three films together, because we're watching this out of order, it creates a deus ex machina moment as the characters from the other movies step in to help out the current characters when all hope appears to be lost, because we've never seen them before. I almost think it's more Kaos that they're out of order than if they'd been filmed and released in the order they were supposed to be. Eventually I'll see Paradise Z, and hopefully someday The Rider will be produced as well, because this first one was compelling, and I'd like to see how the rest of it plays out.

Finally, I mentioned in the first paragraph that a fellow Pear Tree wrote the screenplay for this, that's because my last name, Poirier, is French for Pear Tree, and the screenwriter for this was Steven Poirier. According to IMDb the only two films he's written are this and Paradise Z. In his IMDb bio, he said he's descended from Acadian French who came to Nova Scotia from France in the 17th century, and I had recently done some research on my lineage and discovered I too was descended from Acadian French who came here in the 17th century, only my line moved to Quebec in the 18th century. Wonders never cease, but it's great to see a Poirier making it happen.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is currently in Starz Purgatory, but hopefully it'll be back on Tubi soon. I think if you're a Dacascos fan, this is worth checking out, you'll appreciate it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9272568

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

The Big Fall (1997)

For this month's PM post, I figured I'd do the third of three films C. Thomas Howell did with them, having already done the first two. When you look at all the names included too, you can see why a review was needed. In addition to us, Matt Spector at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and David Wain at The Schlock Pit have covered this as well.

The Big Fall has Howell as Blaise Rybeck, a private investigator with a big heart who's having trouble making ends meet, despite having a nice big office, an office assistant (Kathy Griffin), and an intern (Sam Seder). All that changes when beautiful possible femme fatale Emma (Sophie Ward) comes to Rybeck asking her to find her brother, who disappeared while flying a light plane. Turns out he was involved with some rough characters, including Jeff Kober and Titus Welliver, but as Howell gets in deeper, he starts to realize maybe Emma isn't who she said she is, and maybe she's more involved with them than he thought. Then, as if we didn't have enough players, a young FBI agent who has a past with Howell is now assigned to take them down too. Will Howell solve the crime and get out alive?

This is an interesting one compared to the other two Howell did for PM. It flows back and forth between what we expect to be a PM Entertainment film, with explosions and people crashing through glass windows, but they feel shoehorned into Howell's attempt at a neo-Noir that leans heavily on more classic Film Noir themes. Like in the first ten minutes, we get these well-shot, stylized scenes of Howell smoking a cigar at an exclusive club while flirting with Kelly Rutherford, which then bleeds into a fight scene, car crashes, and Howell falling off a roof and crashing through a window. But then we don't see as much action for longer stretches than we're used to in a PM flick, and in the struggle between PM elements and neo-Noir, the latter wins out mostly. Also some of the PM elements don't feel as great, like the car chase later in the film where the cinematography wasn't what we usually get on PM action scenes, and was shot to make the thing feel a bit claustrophobic. There are some things for this to hang its hat on though. Howell actually bungee jumps. He also has a fight scene with Titus Welliver, which is something I feel like I'd want if I see their two names on the tin. And then we get these other names, like Kathy Griffin, Sam Seder, and Jeff Kober, who, along with Welliver, add a little more flavor, as did the one-off scene with Rutherford, and Sophie Ward as our Film Noir femme fatale. This is probably more for PM completists, but because I consider myself one, I think this is worth checking out on a free streamer.

We're now at 17 films for C. Thomas Howell, which feels like a good number, plus we have a couple we discussed on the pod that I could review soon, so that number could go higher. A lot of his tags came in the first few years of the site, when he had teamed up with The Asylum and was making War of the Worlds movies with them. It wasn't until later when Kenner from Movies in the Attic told me to watch The Sweeper that I discovered his PM Entertainment oeuvre, and while I didn't like this one as much as that or Pure Danger, I think these three work better than his Asylum output. Even this one is trying things that I don't know if The Asylum would've let him try, and while it may not always fit for PM, I appreciated that he had the room to do it, because when it did work, like the scene with Kelly Rutherford, I thought it worked really well. In my review of Mutant Vampire Zombies from the 'Hood! I said that Howell just didn't click for me, but I think seeing his PM films I have a new perspective, so it'll be interesting to see how he goes from here. Also this is his fifth directed film on the site, which isn't a bad number either. 

Denney Pierce is the action director for this movie. If you're not familiar with him, he does a lot of work with Spiro Razatos, especially stunt driving, and so like Razatos, he's a big part of why a lot of the PM films we love so much are great, but also why so many 2010s big budget action movies were great. I thought he did well as action director here, despite the fact that the film didn't have a lot of scenes for him to work with. Also, Igor Meglic, who is Razatos's action DP, wasn't on this either, instead we had Clive Sacke as second unit DP, and Jürgen Baum, who himself had done a lot of second unit DP work, as cinematographer. I'm not saying they did a bad job, but I think it may have explained why the chase scene near the middle didn't look the way we expect a PM action scene to look. And I think you can also say that about Jürgen Baum as cinematographer, he did a good job, but because he's not Richard Pepin or Ken Blakey, the film didn't have as much of the PM feel we've come to expect, and in that sense this movie feels more like one of the PM films Pepin and Merhi distributed, as opposed to one they produced in house. Probably not a selling point as a film on its own, but almost 60 PM flicks in, seeing some of these unique elements becomes more interesting the more of these we watch.

In the second screenshot you may recognize that young man as Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report YouTube channel, which was originally on Air America (or still is on that too, if that still exists, I'm not sure anymore). While I don't watch The Majority Report, it gets pushed to me a lot, and I do remember its early days when he co-hosted with Janeane Garofalo. The fact that the show has lasted this long, and has navigated all of the changes in the media landscape in that time, is quite a feat, and now it looks like it's thriving on YouTube. It's strange though, when you look at his four box on IMDb, The Big Fall isn't listed among them. To quote Jillian Michaels when he was debating her, "Come on Sam!"--or rather, instead of debating, she was looking things up on ChatGPT and reading off the answers to him as a form of rebuttal. As great as anything is you've done, or are going to do, getting shot by Jeff Kober in a drive-by and crashing through the plate glass window of a café will always be the tops. Even if a stunt man did it, it was your character, and you developed him to the point that we really felt it when you were lying there close to death, and Howell put a hand on your character's mother's shoulder and told her you were going to pull through. Even if you don't appreciate it, The Big Fall will always be part of your four box in my heart.

Finally, Sophie Ward didn't look all that comfortable smoking cigarettes in this movie. It reminded me of when we see younger actors do it today, because they didn't grow up around smoking, so it's not a natural thing for them. It'll be interesting to watch as we get further away from the generations that were comfortable smoking, how we'll be able to make period pictures. It's like the young Millennial women speaking in vocal fry while on dates with Don Draper on Mad Men. At some point though, us who grew up with smoking, during a time when parents smoked while tying their two-year-old's shoes as they sat in their stroller, while their friends came over to chat with them and smoked too, will die off, and the only people left will be people who are unfamiliar with it, kids who grew up with hipster parents that act like they're older than they are, and kind of don't remember a time when smoking was prevalent either, despite saying they do. In 2035 when the newly Netflix-owned HBO Max (after they bought it off Paramount+ when Oracle had to sell it off when ChatGPT couldn't pay to lease the data centers they built for them, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in the process) decides to reboot The Wire, are kids who were born in 2002 going to be able to look like Dominic West when they smoke? (And yes, I'm assuming they'll make it a period piece because Y2K will be so in then.)

This is going off the rails, so I better wrap it now. You can get this free on Amazon, I think even if you don't have Prime. There's also a version on YouTube that's not as great quality, but it'll do in a pinch, and you can find that in my PM playlist on my YouTube channel. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115677

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.