By Dwight Brown
NNPA Film Critic
(**1/2) It’s real. It happened. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time has consequences. This is what went down.
One night in Southern California, Long Ma (Hiệp Trần Nghĩa), an elderly Vietnamese/American cab driver, is working a late-night shift and he picks up three passengers. They turn out to be escaped convicts. Tây (Dustin Nguyen), a Vietnamese crook, sets the stage and terms: “Follow orders and you won’t get hurt.” Fellow felons Eddie (Phi Vu) and hot-headed Aden (Dali Benssaiah) also hold the senior citizen hostage in a cheap motel room. Things don’t go as planned.
The villains abuse the driver, an innocent man who haphazardly got caught up in their violence and heated group dynamics. While others his age are retired and collecting social security, this senior citizen is on the hot seat. Never knowing if he’ll survive or ever see his family, again. What a setup. What a premise.
This volatile scenario could have been an ultra-violent, Tarantino-ish crime/thriller. Instead, writer/director Sing J. Lee and cowriter Christopher Chen don’t go for the obvious. Amid the turmoil, the film explores the power of family and Asian culture vs the detached anger of those who have lost their way. All this culled from a real incident that happened in Southern California’s Orange County in 2016.
As a first-time feature film director, Lee honed his talents on shorts and videos (“Alicia Keys: Old Memories:” “Zayn: Sour Diesel”). His sense of spacing, staging and film noire style is solid. What’s on view is moody, dark and cynical. The situation is testy, foreboding and morally complex. Visually and emotionally this menacing tone is sustained even when the plotline wanes and viewers’ interests likely do too. He and co-screenwriter Chen could have benefited from a course in advanced playwriting.
Good playwrights, who don’t have the luxury of multiple locations or convenient flashbacks, learn how to keep the drama and suspense real within four walls. They build ties and tension among the characters. Tumultuous feelings like love, hate, anger, fear, rivalry, jealousy and desperation. Then establish a rocky base that builds to an authentic feeling climax, that’s often revelatory. Some of that is on view here, but not strongly enough and as well-executed as it could be to warrant the film’s length. Though the two main characters reach a détente, it doesn’t compensate for the slow-moving train that comes before it.
Many scenes are longer than they should be and at 1H 49M the footage could have used some judicious clipping (editor Yang Hua Hu). But to their credit, the filmmakers make you slow down until you see things their way. On their time frame and from their viewpoint (cinematographer Michael Fernandez). The claustrophobic sets (production designer Hanrui Wang) make you feel captured and closed in like you’re stuck in a chicken coop. For all the elements that don’t’ work, there’s often a counter balance of things that do.
Nghĩa as the vulnerable 80ish protagonist is so right. Caught like a deer in the headlights and fighting for his life using ingenuity. Nguyen as the wayward son who’s lost his cultural identity and sense of humanity is an even more developed character. His rage seems as real as his misguidance.
It will take discipline for audiences to sit through this ode to urban crime, but that’s just the surface story. Oddly the social aspects may linger long after the obvious fireworks have dissipated. A theme of redemption will stick with audiences, though not nearly as well as it does in other salvation among the ruined man movies. Like New Zealand’s Once Were Warriors. Like South Africa’s Tsotsi, 2005’s Oscar-Winner for Best Foreign Language.
In that way, this story would have power even if it was told about immigrants from other communities in the U.S. who’ve faced the same moral and assimilation challenges: Europeans, Africans, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, Latinos… People from foreign lands who make bad choices and wander into the world of crime. Lost souls who’ll only find their bearings again if they’re tuned back into their cultural moorings.
In the end, a lot of intangibles save this film, and you have to acquiesce to Lee’s interpretation of an immigrant’s ordeal. He creates a subtext story that adds humanity to what is usually a very inhumane genre. And in his own way, he succeeds.
Visit Film Critic Dwight Brown at DwightBrownInk.com.
