This is a movie that not many have seen (it tanked at the box office) and probably not many have even heard of it either. It stars Dax Shepard as a former getaway driver for bank robberies (a great “movie job” that may not exist in real life as most bank robbers would do their own driving) living in Witness Protection with his girlfriend (played by Shepard’s real life fiancee Kristen Bell). He then has to drive her to L.A. for a job interview with one problem: the people he’s hiding from are in L.A. What follows is a weird, thrown together quasi-chase movie that seems to be deliberately trying to round up the most random cast ever assembled as Kristen Chenoweth (as a pill popping co-worker), Tom Arnold (as a gay US Marshall), and Bradley Cooper (as a dreadlocked former associate of Shepard’s character) all put in screen time.
What Works: Cooper only has a handful of scenes——-you get the sense he’s just doing a favor for his friends——and yet he’s been featured front and center on all the promotional materials since he’s the biggest “star” in the movie. You can see why. In his couple scenes, he creates a fully realized character, a basically nice, mellow guy who can become capable of calculated rage. Plus, he and Joy Bryant (Shepard’s Parenthood co-star, who has never really been given the role she deserves) have a nice chemistry as criminal (yet cozy) lovebirds. In fact, I would much rather have watched a movie about their coupling than the fairly conventional one that anchors this movie.
What Doesn’t Work: There’s something so random and shaggy around the edges about this story that you wonder why Shepard (who co-directed and co-wrote the script) felt he just had to tell it. I get that it’s inspired by 70’s movies (that often felt like they had the loosest of plot threads holding them together) and as a rebuttal to the ultra-programmed movie era we now live in, but why make a vanity project that essentially says nothing (except for, seemingly, that a time when movies didn’t have to say anything was great)? The problem is that for all the funny, off-kilter moments, the film really is more conventional than it might think. By the time the ridiculously over-the-top chase scene ending rolled around (where the bad guys go to jail, and the marshall gets a boyfriend, and Dax gets the girl, and the girl gets her dream job!) I really didn’t get what the point was.
And would it really kill Hollywood to let a black woman/white man couple (or, really, any interracial couple) have a happy ending? They’re either going to jail or one of them gets killed or splitting up or both of them gets killed, and it’s a little regressive that in 2012 entertainment interracial couples are either invisible or destined for tragedy.
What I Would Have Done Differently: He could have gone two ways with this. One is to really find something to say (pick a theme, really any theme) that couldn’t be described to an eight year old. Or he could have pushed the wilder elements out more, and, you know, with a “villain” this likable, why not let him get away with it? Why not just have the ending that I’ve never seen in a movie before: the villain gets the money he wants, he lets the hero go, and the hero just shakes hands with him at the end. Why can’t everyone win? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie end the way this one could have, and, if it had, I’d probably be able to remember it a year from now…which I can’t say about the movie I saw.
I think this movie might not be a hit and we had better run. LOL