GETAWAY – The Review

GETAWAY kicks off with a rip-roaring car chase through the busy streets of Bulgaria with dozens of police hot on Ethan Hawke’s tail. About ten minutes later  there’s another rip-roaring car chase through the busy streets of Bulgaria with dozens of police hot on Hawke’s tail. Then another. GETAWAY starts spinning its wheels early and not only never recovers, it just keeps getting worse and worse until it’s to the point where it’s so awful it’s almost great. But no.….it’s just awful.

Ethan Hawke is Brent Magna, a former racecar driver forced to steal a Shelby Mustang Super Snake loaded with surveillance equipment and follow the remote orders of “The Voice”, a mysterious kidnapper played by Jon Voight, (or at least played by the many close-ups of Mr. Voight’s jaw) who’s watching Magna’s every move through the cameras and microphones mounted within the car.  GETAWAY opens with some brief flashbacks of Magna’s wife being abducted (all flashbacks are coded in black and white so slower viewers know they’re flashbacks). The Voice comes up with a series of assignments for Magna to pull off. These tasks mostly consist of driving as fast as possible through crowds of people, through red lights, across ice rinks, through parks, plowing over Christmas trees, etc. “Smash into the back of that truck” instructs The Voice. If Magna wrecks or gets caught, his wife, as he’s reminded about a dozen times, will die. It’s like if Scorpio in DIRTY HARRY was a Grand Theft Auto-obsessed 14-year old. We’ll eventually find out what The Voice’s plan is but not why so much carnage was necessary getting there. Along the way Magna picks up an abrasive teenager played by a chipmuncky Salena Gomez whose name we never learn despite a line where she actually says “do you even know my name?”  She at first attempts to carjack Magna wearing a dark hoodie because, in a plot twist that makes no sense, the Shelby is her car, and she just wants it back. “The Kid”, as she’s credited, has two skills; she’s a wiz at hacking into computers, a talent that comes in handy in a couple of scenes, and she claims to be an expert mechanic, a skill that does not. When Magna and The Kid discover what The Voice is really after, they team up to turn the tables on their tormentor.

Credit writers Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker for not letting the plot get in the way of the mindless car chases but their script is all chassis and no engine. When the whole caper turns out to be the theft of a stack of computer drives from a bank, we’re subjected to dialog like:

Hawke – “Where’s my wife!?”

Henchman #1: “Where’s my drives!?”

GETAWAY is the type of utterly bad action nonsense that could not have even looked good on paper, so it isn’t possible to forgive Mr. Hawke for accepting this assignment – and judging by the way he mumbles his lines, even he is embarrassed to be on screen. As for Miss Gomez, the young actress so good in SPRING BREAKERS earlier this year takes a huge step back, giving the shrillest, surliest, and simply most abysmal performance I’ve seen this year (she also says ‘shit’ a lot). There isn’t much to director Courtney Solomon’s film besides mayhem and muscle cars, and he can’t even get those things right. His messy direction lacks grip and acceleration. Automobiles are constantly launching into the air in defiance of physics and the blurred-together chase scenes all resemble each other. Worst of all (and that’s really saying something), GETAWAY doesn’t even live up to what little promise it had. This is the type of film whose hero needs to be in the right regardless of his flagrant disregard for general public safety. No bystanders are actually shown dying, but so many cars that are in Magna’s path flip, collide, crash, and burn, that collateral fatalities have to be at least be in the dozens.

GETAWAY tries hard for B-movie status but is but its joyless and no fun. Maybe they should have gone all the way and went as over-the-top as possible or perhaps gone for satire, but what is on the screen doesn’t work and I expect to see GETAWAY make a lot of ‘ten worst’ lists. I’ll give it a generous one star for moving along at a brisk clip with the end credits starting at about the 82-minute mark, (and it’s still better than MOONRISE KINGDOM). GETAWAY is only for car lovers, devotees of truly bad films, and fans of Jon Voight’s jaw.

1 of 5 Stars