The Refuge is a 2019 crime thriller about a getaway driver who finds himself in harm’s way when he gets caught up in a job involving casino heist money.
The getaway driver in heist movies seem to get all the action these days, stories of their exploits practically a subgenre all is own. Admittedly, they are a curious bunch and as these films so readily point out, crucial to the whole get-the-money-and-run thing. But do we need one more ride in the front seat? Apparently so if writer and director Keith Sutliff has anything to say about it, his sophomore effort The Refuge another somber, stylistic take on the driver and his brush with all things deadly.
In Los Angeles, Markus Hunter (Sutliff) is on the job, a private thug and driver with a sturdy reputation. He’s not lacking for work and his latest involves a past debt owed a boss named Frank (Julien Cesario), who wants Markus to hunt down ex-con Vernon Boyd (Tien Pham) and the twelve million in cash he stole from a casio. For help, Markus calls in sometimes partner Watts Riley (Matthew Webb), the two making a plan with Markus behind the wheel. Naturally, things go badly, and now Markus has heat all over him and a girl named Staci (Reine Swart) the only person he can trust.
Taking the driving part of being a getaway driver to heart, Sutliff spends nearly the entire runtime of The Refuge driving about the warehouse district of LA. I don’t mean that figuratively. There are long, long sequences of just a camera in the backseat looking over Suliff’s shoulder as he silently weaves about the narrow streets, a steady electronic pulse accompanying him as he goes. It’s easy to see what he’s after, a sort of nod to Nicolas Winding Refn‘s artsy answer to getaway movies Drive, but don’t be fooled by the description as Sutliff’s film, as hard as he tries, doesn’t come close to the tension and innovation of that critically-acclaimed title.
What we get instead is a surprisingly immobile story with nearly no energy, the characters mostly sitting in bland reverse angle shots talking about things we quickly lose interest in. It’s entirely inert. More disappointing is the one thing the movie absolutely needs to deliver on, the driving, of which, as mentioned, there is more than enough of but all of it lacking any momentum or worse, consequence. Markus just drives about the city at the posted speed limit over and over and over again, making legal turns and stops with not a single bit of action.
Of the many hats Sutliff wears in this film, it’s directing he has the most command over, even as he indulges in things he really ought not to. There are some genuinely good moments here in there where he makes a few shots work with some interest, proving that he might want to stick to staying behind the camera and letting someone else take the lead in front. His first film, The Mason Brothers, of which he had a supporting role (and I liked a lot), worked well because his central cast was strong. Here, he points the camera at himself for most of the movie, his character barely speaking a work, and it wears thin quickly. It’s too bad, because clearly Sutliff is trying to spin something experimental off an already edgy film style but I can’t recommend the result.