Daniel Casey, writer of the really rather good new cyber-thriller Wardriver, also recently wrote The Fast and the Furious IX, which is some credit; on the one hand, your spell casting has warmed the huddled billions, but your words were also the potentially final frontier on franchise movie production. IX? Even Jason Voorhees left the multiplex for the straight-to-video abyss with his dignity intact before that?
In any event, Casey seems to have recovered well from his adventures with the urban monumentalism of TFF to turn in Wardriver, a nice, low-key thriller about cars and computers, but mostly about character.
Dane DeHaan stars as Cole, a hacker whose speciality is wardriving, or wireless hacks requiring physical proximity. He prowls low-density commercial zones at night in his old Mitsubishi like a bug in Sim City, breaking into poorly secured WiFi to attack the connected systems.
Cole’s sole friend is an unknown, unseen online accomplice called Rollo Tommassi. Rollo is a fellow hacker, fence, and money launderer. He is also the only place Cole has to turn to for advice when he is caught and beaten by Oscar (Mamoudou Athie), the doorman at Bambara, an upscale restaurant that Cole makes the mistake of hacking at the film’s start. Oscar makes a proposal to Cole; he assures him that there is a high-value mark patronizing Bambara, the mysterious, wounded Sarah (Sasha Calle), who has 800,000 dollars in her checking account. Cole’s choice is that he can rob her, or the beatings will continue.
Cole agrees, and instantly regrets it, as his lifetime of loneliness is invaded on all fronts, not least by crime boss Bilson (a brilliantly cool Jeffrey Donovan), who instantly circles the tremors from Cole’s activities like a megalodon shark.
“Cole…prowls low density commercial zones at night in his old Mitsubishi like a bug in Sim City, breaking in to poorly secured WiFi”
Casey’s script is insightful and understands that the physical risk from discovery when war driving is interesting. Also the chances Cole is willing to take getting close to people serve both as arc and metaphor. But while the cheek-by-jowl meatspace workflows are neat inspiration for heist action, the plot’s particulars around hacking soon lapse into iPhone macguffinery. Anyone with a modern bank account who has tried to buy anything bigger than a toaster online knows the chances of actually shunting a million dollars of their own money from an account without it being checked, and the hacks here felt a little hollow at heart.
The film’s real interests are elsewhere, and they are repaid handsomely in a terrific game of cat and mouse between characters that make every human interaction look like loneliness. The isolation here is used by Thomas like a blackjack, with tsunami loads of cinematographer Htat Htut’s starkly lit, negative space crashing over the hunched and misunderstanding forms within as a constant, withering force. Thomas places Casey’s smartly written cast at interesting removes until the film feels cubist, with Drives and Taxi Drivers and Nighthawks at the Diner showing through the creases.
DeHaan has bags under his eyes the Michelin man would find excessive, and he looks perfect, glowering out at the surrounding film as if from a burrow. By turns graceful and clumsy, he’s a terrific lead and holds things together like rebar.
The whole thing is perfectly cast. Mamoudou Athie’s wits, athletics, and shock of peroxide hair make Oscar resemble nothing less than a match tossed at the plot, and his performance is fun and intriguing. Sasha Calle gives it every lick needed as a femme fatale, gorgeous and always her own mystery.
"…a terrific game of cat and mouse..."
