In “Vehicle 19,” Paul Walker is back behind the wheel again, but this time it’s a rented minivan and the plot is brainless even for a Paul Walker movie. Get ready for “The Slow and the Spurious.”
Walker is Michael, an ex-con visiting his ex-wife in Johannesburg, when the rental car he takes from Hertz turns out to be the wrong make, the wrong size and also stocked with a cellphone, a pistol and a beautiful kidnapping victim (Naima McLean) tied up in the back. She explains that she’s a prosecutor investigating a sex-trafficking ring that has implicated the chief of police — who keeps calling Michael on the cellphone to tease him about his chances of escape.
Michael is lost in a town he doesn’t know, in a slow car, where all of the police are on the lookout for him, and yet without much more in his favor than dumb luck and a few bootlegger’s turns he manages to elude everyone who is chasing him, in a series of so-so chases.
Writer-director Mukunda Michael Dewil simply doesn’t have enough ideas to keep the story moving along, meaning the pace is unforgivably tortoise-like.
Car-chase movies shouldn’t feel like crosstown traffic.