Wheelman (2017)

Jeremy Rush's Wheelman arrives with a premise of admirable economy: a getaway driver, a car, a phone, and a double cross that unfolds entirely from behind the steering wheel. Frank Grillo occupies the driver's seat and rarely leaves it, sweating through a night of bank robbers, gangland intermediaries, and a daughter who keeps calling at the worst possible moments. The film runs 82 minutes and deploys 286 instances of a single Anglo-Saxon expletive, a statistic that suggests a certain commitment to the material. It is a B-movie, and it knows it, and it makes no apology for the fact.

What the film declines to do is instructive. The cast is white and male in the main, and the screenplay treats this as a demographic fact of the Philadelphia underworld, not a subject for commentary. Katie exists as a daughter to be protected and a car to be driven; Jessica exists as an ex-wife to be abducted. Neither is granted an inner life, and the film shows no interest in granting them one. The robbery is a robbery, the money is money, and the criminal enterprise is a business with rival management, not a metaphor for late capitalism. No character pauses to explain the moral architecture of the story. Nobody learns anything about society.

The result is a specimen of unusual purity. There is no sermonizing, no corrective gesture toward the audience, no sense that the filmmakers regard the genre as a vehicle for instruction. The violence is transactional. The betrayals are professional. The emotional register extends to a man watching his family embrace through a restaurant window, and then the credits roll. We classify it accordingly, with the mild professional satisfaction of encountering a film that has nothing to confess.