THE ACCIDENTAL GETAWAY DRIVER - Mark Reviews Movies

The Accidental Getaway Driver, Utopia

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 27, 2025

Based on a true and genuinely frightening story, The Accidental Getaway Driver doesn't take the path one might expect from its premise. It seems like one for a harrowing thriller, but co-writer/director Sing J. Lee's movie attempts to dig into the hidden humanity beneath that setup. It's hard at times to entirely see that quality.

Undoubtedly, Lee and Christopher Chen's script, adapting a magazine article by Paul Kix, does find a surprising degree of human connection within this tale. The ending here is quite subdued and sweet, which might be last thing one might expect to be saying about a movie in which an older man is taken hostage by three desperate criminals.

The man is Long (Hiep Tran Nhia), a Vietnamese immigrant living in California and working as a cab driver, presumably catering to other local Vietnamese speakers in the area, since he knows only a little English. There's very little introduction to the character, except for his job, that he lives in an apartment complex, and that there's no one at home waiting for him on what can be late-night calls from people in need of a ride.

While out shopping at a grocery store, Long receives one of those calls. Three men need to get somewhere, but while Long turns down the job initially, the persistent caller eventually offers to pay the driver double his usual fee. It's an offer he can't pass up.

The three men are Tây (Dustin Nguyen), Eddie (Phi Vu), and Aden (Dali Benssalah). The first two have a Vietnamese background, with Tây instructing Long to stop at a local shop and then drive them around while they wait for someone to answer a call with their next location. The whole thing is very suspicious. Long can sense it, and as soon as he asks the men to let him drop them off so that he can go home, Tây pulls out a pistol and aims it at the driver.

Part of the tension here—beyond the obvious, of course, that this innocent man has been abducted and is being held against his will—is that we know more about just how dangerous the situation is for Long than the driver can comprehend. Once mastermind Aden realizes that his hostage almost exclusively speaks and understands Vietnamese, he begins to explain the trio's plans and his own plans for Long in English. Here, it seems, are pure villains, capable of violence and willing to enact it on this innocent man, simply because he took a call and was willing to help them.

From a local news report on the TV at one of the motels where the group stops, what we and Long do learn, however, is that the three have escaped from prison. Tây and Aden were incarcerated on charges of attempted killings and, in the case of the latter, murder. Now, Long knows there's nothing he likely should do to try to escape captivity, even if there was a possibility of him doing so in the first place. Yes, this is based on a true story, which makes it feel a bit uncomfortable to speak about the plot in such terms (especially since we might not know how the real story turned out), but as the premise for a thriller, it's quite effective.

The surprise, then, is how quiet and subtle Lee's approach to the material actually is. With Long's helplessness and the fugitives' potential for cruelty (We learn some details of the crimes that landed them in prison, and one of them is quite grisly) established, Lee and Chen simply observe as the four ride in the car, spend nights and at least one day in those various motel rooms, and talk.

A lot of the conversation, obviously, belongs to the criminals, as they discuss their next steps (trying to retrieve some money, finding false papers, and fleeing the country) and what's to be done with their hostage. Eventually, the three men also confide in Long in some ways, either intentionally or simply as a way to keep him calm, and that's when the most significant shift in the story begins to unfold.

In terms of the tone of the movie, what eventually happens between Long and the fugitives feels coherent. The actual content, however, brings a feeling of disconnect. Aden and, mostly, Tây, for example, start to tell the man their respective stories (Aden about why he was in prison and Tây about more personal details), although Long, of course, can only understand what the latter has to say. Long himself offers a bit of his own past, such as his childhood in Vietnam, the fact that he's a refugee following his military service during the war in his homeland, and that he's estranged from his family.

It's clear that Lee wants to humanize these criminals to some degree and give us a sense of Long's loneliness. Maybe it's the early focus on the thriller element of the story or the simple fact that it's tough to sympathize with the fugitives given their treatment of Long, but the effect of the shift at the center of The Accidental Getaway Driver is jarring. The movie's final scenes are touching in unexpected ways, as Long and one of his captors find a bond that transcends everything that has happened, but the path of arriving at that point isn't entirely convincing.

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