If you want to see cars drive around for 80 minutes, this is the movie for you! The cars are really shiny and they get smashed up a lot! Boom! Boom! And then they drive some more! That’s basically what Courtney Solomon pitched to Warner Brothers when he asked them to produce Getaway, his new load of cinema anus that makes Dungeons and Dragons look like The Godfather. A movie such as this one really cannot be reviewed, as it is not even really a movie-- it’s more like a stunt driver ‘best of’ reel. You could very easily remove every line of dialogue from this movie, and it would still probably have the same emotional impact on you that it normally would. This isn’t even something that mouth-foaming gearheads would watch. It’s just terribly idiotic.
Getaway is the story(?) of Brett Magna, a former Formula One racer played by Ethan Hawke. On Christmas Eve, he comes home to find that his wife has been kidnapped. Through a series of poorly done flashbacks and edits, we see him get a call from a man who tells him to steal a car. He then is told by the mysterious voice on the other end of the phone to do a series of ridiculous stunts with the car. Basically, the whole movie is just set up to show cars crashing around. I honestly can’t say much more about it, as nothing else really happens. It’s just boring as fuck, and the sudden camera cuts every 1/4th of a second don’t help either. It creates a dizzying effect that makes the audience sick to their stomachs. I’ve never seen a film as repulsive to watch as this one.
On to the acting: Ethan Hawke, whose performance in Gattaca ranks as one of my all-time favorites, basically neuters his once-promising career with this. It’s not even that he’s particularly bad-- he conveys the desperation of the character well enough-- but the dialogue he’s given is absolutely atrocious. There are no real conversations in this entire movie, only exclamations. It’s not helped any by Selena Gomez, that little Disney bitch who thinks she’s a legitimate actress, hamming it up with a loud and obnoxious performance as Hawke’s nameless copilot. Her character’s credit is “The Kid,” and that pretty much tells you how deep we go into her personality. She’s a generic, techie, millennial brat who basically whines about Hawke stealing her car for the entire movie. It’s easily one of the most annoying performances I’ve ever seen.
The plot is just stupid as fuck. Hawke is supposed to stage all these car crashes in order to create gridlock, then be blamed for robbing a bank as he escapes via the only available route. But at the end, John Voight’s “The Voice” (wow, these characters are so creatively named) tells him that he only wanted to see him perform stunts, and that he thought Hawke could have been a really good driver if he had put his mind to it. One word: WHAT? I laughed my ass off at that point; it doesn’t even make sense! Why would he set this whole thing up, only to end if by giving Hawke some little fucking life lesson? How stupid can you get?
Really, all you have to do is spend a second thinking about this movie to realize how incredibly lame it is. Nothing coheres, the action is bludgeoning, and the dialogue recycles itself every five minutes. There were about fifteen conversations that Hawke and Gomez had that followed this basic path: “YOU STOLED MAI KAR!” “NO I DINNIT SHUT UP!” “NO U SHUT UP U STOLED MAI KAR!” “I HAVE TO GIT MAI WAIF BAK!” Okay, maybe they didn’t sound as retarded as I made them out to be. But it sure as hell felt like it. It also commits one of the cardinal sins of moviemaking: People don’t act the way they would in real life. They just don’t make the right decisions, and it leaves you slapping your head and laughing incredulously. Case in point: When Gomez first shows up, Voight tells Hawke to kill her. There’s a scene (that I guess was supposed to be intense) where he points the gun to her head while thinking about his wife. When he finally says he can’t do it, Voight responds by saying “Good... you will need her.” WHAT THE FUCK? What if he had killed her, you dumbass? Then your plan would have been pretty FUCKED, huh? Jesus...
Final Score for Getaway: 0/10 stars. There’s literally nothing to this movie. Every scene is just a setup for another chase sequence. It works in as many explosions, car crashes, and spin-outs as it possibly can, but somewhere along the line, somebody lost the script. And it looks like they just decided to press on with making it. At one point, Gomez says “Why is he doing this? What does he want? You obviously haven’t thought this through.” This is exactly what the guys at WB should have asked Courtney Solomon before they made this movie. It’s not just bad. It’s stunningly bad.
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