I assume the direct to DVD market exists for smaller, cheaper
films to have some kind of distribution, even if studios don’t feel they have
enough of a draw to garner a fully theatrical release. I assume that “Getaway”,
a middling cyber-terror, car-chase programmer, was made with the intentions of premiering
at a Redbox near you, but was perhaps elevated to a wide-release due to the
combined star power of Ethan Hawk and Disney’s Selena Gomez. I assume this
because nothing about this film feels worthy of the eight to thirteen dollars
you might pay to see this garbage.
I don’t
care about teen culture enough to have a knee-jerk reaction against it. When Bieber
broke up with Selena Gomez I didn’t care. However, I gave my full support to
Gomez and her tweeny sisters in Harmony Korine’s day-glow satire “Spring
Breakers” and actually, though you could call her involvement stunt-casting, her
performance wasn’t half-bad. I want it to be perfectly clear that Selena Gomez
didn’t ruin “Getaway”. Frankly, she didn’t save or serve the picture either. She’s merely a barbell tied to a sinking titanic of problems.
Ethan
Hawk plays Brent Magna, an ex-race car driver who is on the search to find his
kidnapped wife in a stolen muscle car full of cameras and microphones,
connecting him with the mysterious Russian voice of his spouse’s abductor. He is forced to crash into innocent people,
wreck into unknowing vehicles, and shut down the cities power supply. More
dangerously, he is forced to simultaneously attract and neutralize the police
force.
While enacting the random acts of violence that he
has to perform against his will, Brent is stopped by a trouble teen(Selena
Gomez), who claims the bugged car to be her own. Credited in the film only as “The Kid", Gomez is seen carrying a nine millimeter and
every current Apple product on the market. The voice then forces Magna to kidnap Gomez’s
nameless character and by the movie’s close they have to learn to trust each other
in order to safely end their terrible thrill-ride and to find Brent’s wife before
she’s hurt.
I don’t
ask a lot of ninety minute car-crash movies, but every single aesthetic
decision in this film is so mishandled and misbegotten that you almost have to
give director Courtney Solomon some credit for sheer consistency. Made for a modest eighteen million dollars,
it’s surprisingly that you still can’t see where every dollar was spent. The action is over edited and choppy and half
of the coverage is seen from the perspective of webcams, iPads, and cellphones.
What results is an impatient, seizure-inducing montage of grainy,
low-resolution explosions and reaction shots.
The tension is non-existent and since we never have a clear sense of
where we are or how fast the cars are going the endless chase scenes become
redundant.
When
the film does slow down long enough for the leads to have a conversation we are
primed again for another ugly, jumbled sequence were they’re not required to
talk. Gomez is miscast for sure, but I am not sure anyone else would have made
this movie much better. She has practically nothing to work with but there is
something about her character’s tom-boyish snarkiness, along with her unusually
pitched voice, that becomes grating and difficult to root for. Ethan Hawk does
fine with his thankless role, but if you look close enough into his stern gaze you
can see him counting down the days until he gets paid for participating in this
mess.
Don’t
go see the “Getaway” in theaters. Don’t
rent it and don’t even bother watching it on cable. It’s not bad enough to be entertaining or creative enough to be insanely
misjudged. It’s even not so bad that I hate it. To hate it would be to exert
too much energy for this sloppy, late-summer, slot-filler.
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2013
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