I have fond memories of BMW’s The Hire online short film series from 2001. That was long before I started writing about movies, but I was fortunate enough to have a stepmother who wrote for a local New York publication, so we’d get press materials in the mail at the house. A DVD with all eight short films from BMW arrived one day, and I decided to check it out. What I found was really damn cool. Great production value, an awesome cast, and a magnetic leading man in Clive Owen. This was before Owen became a household name, and I recall thinking, “This guy needs to be the next James Bond!”
The action-packed mini-movies were directed by people like John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Wong Kar Wai, Guy Ritchie, Alejandro González Iñárritu, John Woo, Joe Carnahan and Tony Scott, and featured actors like Gary Oldman, Don Cheadle, Mickey Rourke, F. Murray Abraham and James Brown. Yes, James f’ing Brown!
Well, anyway, it’s been 15 years and BMW is back with a special film called The Escape. They’ve brought Owen back, and this time he’ll be joined by The Punisher himself, Jon Bernthal, as well as Dakota Fanning, and Vera Farmiga. That’s not all, but they got Neill Blomkamp to direct The Escape. So, once again, it looks like BMW has pulled out all the stops.
BMW has just released an exciting new trailer for The Escape which you can see here: