As does a hot vintage Porsche, a nice step up from the intentionally 'nondescript' car Grillo drives for most of the film. The movie's tight framing and economy of angles means Wheelman's chases aren't as thrilling as they might have been, but that Porsche helps set things straight with chase-movie fans in the end. Included free with your Wheelman as a mobile app: Available for iPhone, iPad, or Android phones or tablets; Everything you expect with a mobile app, use your mobile device to pinch-to-zoom, swipe menus, landscape and portrait mode, change font sizes and switch to night-mode.
Vin Diesel is the new Sonic! Well, he's got two games out in the space of a month. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena should be interesting. The first one, Escape From Butcher Bay, was a surprisingly low-key, atmospheric first-person action game where Vin did almost as much good with his mouth as he did with his fists and shadows. But first there's Wheelman, which is much closer to what you'd expect from a trip to see beefy old gravel-mouth at the cinema (or on DVD when you're pissed, which seems more likely). It's all about fast cars, firearms and confrontation. But mostly fast cars.
Vin Diesel nominally plays Milo Burik, some sort of undercover policeman from Miami who's in Barcelona to sort out the Catalonian underworld or something, but really he plays Vin Diesel, muscle-bound baldie with a leather tongue and a love of cars, and he drives them around on all sorts of pretexts smashing up the city, drifting, boosting off ramps and doing ridiculous flying carjacks on the motorway, occasionally spinning his car 360 degrees in slow motion to shoot out petrol tanks with pinpoint accuracy. Forget whatever else is happening: look at Vin! In a car!
For a while, as you're getting used to 'Air Jacks' and 'Cyclone' attacks, you actually get a bit excited about this, because Midway Studios Newcastle appears to be onto something: rather than following GTA out of the car and onto the streets to go a bit Michael Mann, the focus is on solving all the world's problems from the driver's seat. Has Midway, amazingly, somehow repeated the Riddick trick, and inadvertently channelled one of the bald hero's passions into a smart take on an old standard?
If you need to take somebody out, you don't bash into them until they get out and then chase them onto a rooftop and stick 'em with their own knife; you pull alongside them and use the right analogue stick to sideswipe them until their car's in critical condition, and then you do it again so they cartwheel through the air and explode. Sometimes they have guns, but that's okay, because so does Vin Diesel, so you hold down the left bumper to shoot out the tyres automatically, or you use Cyclone or Aimed Shot to target them in slow motion and take them out in one shot.
You don't even have to get out of your car to get another one. Instead you can line up behind something you like the look of and hold a button until an icon goes green, at which point Vin Diesel climbs smoothly out of the driver-side window, leaps impossibly through the air and lands on the other car, swinging neatly through the passenger window to boot the driver onto the street and take over the wheel. He can do it for bikes too. And scooters. Vin Diesel isn't afraid of riding scooters.
The city of Barcelona is hardly living and breathing, and hardly the entire city of Barcelona either - it's a simplified playground designed for Vin Diesel, with broad thoroughfares connected by a few alleyways, and just enough traffic to add obstacles to pursuit missions but not enough to slow you down. You glide effortlessly over kerbs, use stairways and roundabouts as ramps, mow down trees and lamp-posts and street cafés as if they're not there, and the police barely ever turn up unless a mission tells them to, and even then, they're easily outwitted. Supraball legendary items.
Everything is in service to the one core goal: let Vin Diesel drive around in a car being a maniac, because that worked in The Fast and the Furious. As if to hammer the point home, the threadbare story mode quickly takes a back seat to the dozens of side missions available on your GPS map, which are all about driving fast and smashing things up. Vin Diesel doesn't like to wait around, so you can hop straight to them at the click of a button, and soon you're playing Crazy Taxi, taking part in street races, assassinating other drivers car-to-car, stealing vehicles to order and sometimes just smashing up the city until you've caused a set amount of damage. Doing all these missions unlocks garages, weapon caches and upgrades for the Focus meter that powers your Cyclones and boosts, and it's all unapologetically videogamey. You certainly can't imagine Vin Diesel apologising.
Frank Grillo drives through the night
By Richard Whittaker, 12:45PM, Mon. Sep. 25, 2017
In case you hadn't noticed, Frank Grillo is a star. For anyone who needs convincing, heist flick Wheelman is final proof.
Between U.S. successes like his breakout role as Crossbones in the Captain America films, plus anchoring two movies in the blockbuster The Purge franchise, and the massive success in China of Wolf Warrior II ($780 million box office and counting), Grillo is a man in demand. It's no surprise: he's an old-school action hero, grizzled, wiry, and lean, in the lineage of Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin. He's got a face that looks like it could take a punch, and a fighter's stance that says he can hand them out, too.
Digimon masters online leveling guide 2019. But in Wheelman, it's just Grillo, a car, and a phone. In the classic tradition established by The Driver, he is a nameless getaway driver, hired for a bank robbery. When it all goes south (as it inevitably does), he's on his own, taking and receiving calls that get him deeper and deeper into trouble.
But the camera isn't really on Grillo. It's really on the car, and the action never shifts more than a few inches away from the bodywork, as the wheelman rolls through Boston, searching for safe passage and a way out of this mess.
The real-time trip inside a moving vehicle is scarcely a new conceit. It gave structure to Tom Hardy's rightly lauded performance in the contemplative character study Locke, while Bryan Bockbrader gave it a pulp edge with Vanish. For Wheelman, first time writer/director Jeremy Rush strikes a middle path between the two. On one side, he gives Grillo a meaty character piece to rip in to as a father struggling through a messy divorce. On the other, he's a growling action figure, caught up in a boiling gang war.
Yet where this may have both earlier films beat is in the way it's shot. Cinematographer Juan Miguel Azpiroz gives new emphasis to the term 'establishing shot,' as he signals that the camera will almost never get more than a few inches from the car – the distance of a GoPro mount. This is a white-knuckle ride, with a twisting script to match.
As the first film from Grillo's WarParty shingle, co-founded with Joe Carnahan (director of The Grey and Smokin' Aces), this explicitly and immaculately sets out their agenda of action flicks with brains. The fact it's been acquired already by Netflix means that it has a chance at a big home audience. But goddamn, this mean machine needs to be seen on the big screen.
Wheelman
Monday, Sept. 25, 2:20pmWednesday, Sept. 27, 12:15am
Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 21-29. Follow all the announcements, news, reviews, and interviews at www.austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.
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- Category: Category
As does a hot vintage Porsche, a nice step up from the intentionally 'nondescript' car Grillo drives for most of the film. The movie's tight framing and economy of angles means Wheelman's chases aren't as thrilling as they might have been, but that Porsche helps set things straight with chase-movie fans in the end. Included free with your Wheelman as a mobile app: Available for iPhone, iPad, or Android phones or tablets; Everything you expect with a mobile app, use your mobile device to pinch-to-zoom, swipe menus, landscape and portrait mode, change font sizes and switch to night-mode.
Vin Diesel is the new Sonic! Well, he's got two games out in the space of a month. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena should be interesting. The first one, Escape From Butcher Bay, was a surprisingly low-key, atmospheric first-person action game where Vin did almost as much good with his mouth as he did with his fists and shadows. But first there's Wheelman, which is much closer to what you'd expect from a trip to see beefy old gravel-mouth at the cinema (or on DVD when you're pissed, which seems more likely). It's all about fast cars, firearms and confrontation. But mostly fast cars.
Vin Diesel nominally plays Milo Burik, some sort of undercover policeman from Miami who's in Barcelona to sort out the Catalonian underworld or something, but really he plays Vin Diesel, muscle-bound baldie with a leather tongue and a love of cars, and he drives them around on all sorts of pretexts smashing up the city, drifting, boosting off ramps and doing ridiculous flying carjacks on the motorway, occasionally spinning his car 360 degrees in slow motion to shoot out petrol tanks with pinpoint accuracy. Forget whatever else is happening: look at Vin! In a car!
For a while, as you're getting used to 'Air Jacks' and 'Cyclone' attacks, you actually get a bit excited about this, because Midway Studios Newcastle appears to be onto something: rather than following GTA out of the car and onto the streets to go a bit Michael Mann, the focus is on solving all the world's problems from the driver's seat. Has Midway, amazingly, somehow repeated the Riddick trick, and inadvertently channelled one of the bald hero's passions into a smart take on an old standard?
If you need to take somebody out, you don't bash into them until they get out and then chase them onto a rooftop and stick 'em with their own knife; you pull alongside them and use the right analogue stick to sideswipe them until their car's in critical condition, and then you do it again so they cartwheel through the air and explode. Sometimes they have guns, but that's okay, because so does Vin Diesel, so you hold down the left bumper to shoot out the tyres automatically, or you use Cyclone or Aimed Shot to target them in slow motion and take them out in one shot.
You don't even have to get out of your car to get another one. Instead you can line up behind something you like the look of and hold a button until an icon goes green, at which point Vin Diesel climbs smoothly out of the driver-side window, leaps impossibly through the air and lands on the other car, swinging neatly through the passenger window to boot the driver onto the street and take over the wheel. He can do it for bikes too. And scooters. Vin Diesel isn't afraid of riding scooters.
The city of Barcelona is hardly living and breathing, and hardly the entire city of Barcelona either - it's a simplified playground designed for Vin Diesel, with broad thoroughfares connected by a few alleyways, and just enough traffic to add obstacles to pursuit missions but not enough to slow you down. You glide effortlessly over kerbs, use stairways and roundabouts as ramps, mow down trees and lamp-posts and street cafés as if they're not there, and the police barely ever turn up unless a mission tells them to, and even then, they're easily outwitted. Supraball legendary items.
Everything is in service to the one core goal: let Vin Diesel drive around in a car being a maniac, because that worked in The Fast and the Furious. As if to hammer the point home, the threadbare story mode quickly takes a back seat to the dozens of side missions available on your GPS map, which are all about driving fast and smashing things up. Vin Diesel doesn't like to wait around, so you can hop straight to them at the click of a button, and soon you're playing Crazy Taxi, taking part in street races, assassinating other drivers car-to-car, stealing vehicles to order and sometimes just smashing up the city until you've caused a set amount of damage. Doing all these missions unlocks garages, weapon caches and upgrades for the Focus meter that powers your Cyclones and boosts, and it's all unapologetically videogamey. You certainly can't imagine Vin Diesel apologising.
Frank Grillo drives through the night
By Richard Whittaker, 12:45PM, Mon. Sep. 25, 2017
In case you hadn't noticed, Frank Grillo is a star. For anyone who needs convincing, heist flick Wheelman is final proof.
Between U.S. successes like his breakout role as Crossbones in the Captain America films, plus anchoring two movies in the blockbuster The Purge franchise, and the massive success in China of Wolf Warrior II ($780 million box office and counting), Grillo is a man in demand. It's no surprise: he's an old-school action hero, grizzled, wiry, and lean, in the lineage of Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin. He's got a face that looks like it could take a punch, and a fighter's stance that says he can hand them out, too.
Digimon masters online leveling guide 2019. But in Wheelman, it's just Grillo, a car, and a phone. In the classic tradition established by The Driver, he is a nameless getaway driver, hired for a bank robbery. When it all goes south (as it inevitably does), he's on his own, taking and receiving calls that get him deeper and deeper into trouble.
But the camera isn't really on Grillo. It's really on the car, and the action never shifts more than a few inches away from the bodywork, as the wheelman rolls through Boston, searching for safe passage and a way out of this mess.
The real-time trip inside a moving vehicle is scarcely a new conceit. It gave structure to Tom Hardy's rightly lauded performance in the contemplative character study Locke, while Bryan Bockbrader gave it a pulp edge with Vanish. For Wheelman, first time writer/director Jeremy Rush strikes a middle path between the two. On one side, he gives Grillo a meaty character piece to rip in to as a father struggling through a messy divorce. On the other, he's a growling action figure, caught up in a boiling gang war.
Yet where this may have both earlier films beat is in the way it's shot. Cinematographer Juan Miguel Azpiroz gives new emphasis to the term 'establishing shot,' as he signals that the camera will almost never get more than a few inches from the car – the distance of a GoPro mount. This is a white-knuckle ride, with a twisting script to match.
As the first film from Grillo's WarParty shingle, co-founded with Joe Carnahan (director of The Grey and Smokin' Aces), this explicitly and immaculately sets out their agenda of action flicks with brains. The fact it's been acquired already by Netflix means that it has a chance at a big home audience. But goddamn, this mean machine needs to be seen on the big screen.
Wheelman
Monday, Sept. 25, 2:20pmWednesday, Sept. 27, 12:15am
Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 21-29. Follow all the announcements, news, reviews, and interviews at www.austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.