After his stellar turn as John Wick superfan and nemesis in John Wick 3, Mark Dacascos leads new home entertainment release, The Driver. Set years into a zombie apocalypse, Dacascos plays a driver who is part of the security team for a ramshackle pocket of survivors. He lives within the community with his wife and daughter (played by Sacacos’ real-life wife and daughter, Eerie Indiana’s Julie Condra, and Noelani Dacascos respectively), but dreams of taking them to a rumoured haven. After a deadly betrayal renders the encampment inhospitable and his wife dead, the driver escapes with his daughter. The problem is, he’s been bitten by a zombie and only has hours to live – can they find the sanctuary in time?
By casting a real-life family, director Wych Kaosayananda has skipped over that pesky issue of on-screen chemistry. It’s often hard to find a family on screen who all convincingly work together, and by taking this shortcut, Kaosayananda saves himself some stress. This tactic works especially well with the young Dacascos. Children in films sometimes struggle to look comfortable with their adult co-stars, but here there is no such problem. Because of their blood connection, there’s an effective naturalness to the performances, the dialogue flowing freely. It also helps that Dacascos senior has had a healthy career in action cinema, and as his character unloads his knowledge of guns and fighting to his daughter, it feels as though you are simply watching Dacascos himself give his daughter a lesson.
The production, for the most part, looks great. However, with a chunk of the story unfolding within a car in motion, the green screened landscapes sometimes become a little distracting. This is not something that you want, given all the hard emotional work the leads are unloading. The action elements are fairly standard and don’t fully utilise Dacascos’ talents, but it is within the zombies that The Driver really fails. Choosing to make them fast like in 28 Days Later, and attracted to noise as in The Walking Dead, are both reasonable decisions, but their make-up and portrayal makes them look more silly than scary.
Those expecting a martial arts, action heavy film – an arena in which Dacascos has built a career in – may struggle to connect with The Driver. So too might hardcore zombie fans. Whilst marketed as being a hybrid of both, The Driver actually pushes both of those themes to the sidelines and instead puts an emotional and touching drama at the forefront. The result is a film that is calm and thoughtful, almost meditative at times. This approach means that The Driver shares more in common with Maggie and Stakeland than the action-packed movie promised in the marketing materials.
A rather different film than advertised, The Driver is nonetheless vastly improved by the real-life connections of its stars. Outside of that connection, the film struggles to find exactly where it wants to put its feet. Throw in some questionable zombie effects, and you have a film that has a good heart, but not the rest of the body required to make it whole.
The Driver is out now on DVD and Digital HD.
The Driver
Summary
A daddy-daughter emotion heavy, road-movie, zombie action thriller, doesn’t exactly roll off of the tongue, and the end result does not feel like a cohesive feature.
