Overdrive (2017)

Overdrive arrives from 2017 as an international co-production of France, Belgium and the United States, the sort of arrangement that produces a film with four passports and no homeland. Antonio Negret directs Scott Eastwood and Freddie Thorp as half-brothers who steal expensive cars in the South of France and run afoul of a Marseille crime boss. The picture was a box office bomb, holds a 29 percent approval rating, and was described by The Hollywood Reporter as witless, brainless, and not entirely joyless. That last clause is generous but not inaccurate.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank, and the film seems content with that. The cast is cosmopolitan (Cuban-born Ana de Armas, French-Armenian Simon Abkarian, Algerian-born Moussa Maaskri), though this reflects the financing map more than any casting philosophy. Race is never raised. Neither is class, though the characters spend ninety minutes stealing from the wealthy; their motives are greed and revenge, which are not the same as critique. The environment goes unmentioned while Bugattis and Maseratis are driven at speed and occasionally into the sea.

The lone point of interest is Stephanie, played by de Armas, who spends much of the runtime bound and gagged beneath a descending car wheel. She does pick a lock and steal a key and arm herself with a rifle, a small act of self-rescue that the screenplay declines to frame as anything. There is no argument here, no sermon, no lesson. This is a formulaic heist fantasy about beautiful people and fast cars, made for adolescent male button-pushing and honest about it. The film's cultural awareness is nil. Its commitment to that nil is, in its way, complete.