Noelani Dacascos

(On Cable TV, September 2021) There are premises that seem hard to mishandle — for instance, having a father and young daughter do a road trip to safety in the middle of a zombie epidemic, even as the father has been bitten. Even better, having the pair being played by real-life daughter-and-father Noelani and Mark Dacascos, the latter of whom is a solid (if not always well-used or well-directed) low-budget action performer since the 1990s. But the ways in which a film can screw up are far more numerous than the ways a premise can be execution-proof, and so The Driver ends up being a singularly limp and forgettable affair. The zombie element is (at infrequent exceptions) a background noise rather than an existential threat. The action elements are far fewer than expected, and the film is closer to straight-up drama than an outright action movie. Then there’s a fundamental problem with the premise in that zombies are not, as a rule, very good drivers — so the kinetic aspect of a drive does not incorporate a chase. This limits the film in a way that the rest of the execution fails to improve. The Driver is simply dull, the characters fail to come to life and the ending is disappointing, especially as it sucks the life of a film whose better moments are toward the beginning. The change of scenery of shooting a film in Thailand doesn’t matter as much as anyone would think, and even the slick cinematography from director Wych Kaosayananda can’t save an overlong result. I still think that there’s a good film to be made about core premise… but it’s not going to be The Driver that does it.