Getaway

Getaway is like taking an eight hour road trip with that one annoying family member who constantly bombards you with idiotic questions and won’t stop taking for two seconds. It’s a joyless ride through the streets of Blugaria that suffers from terrible editing and an even worse plot that crashes and burns before it’s even out of the gate.

Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) is a former race car driver whose wife is kidnapped by a mysterious man and is forced to drive around the city causing destruction and evading the police if he wants to see her alive again. The situation is further complicated when a young tech-savvy girl known as The Kid (Selena Gomez) is forced into the passenger seat and taken along for the ride. Everything has been meticulously planned by the person at the other end of the phone line and if Brent doesn’t do what he says or is caught by the police, his wife is dead.

For a film that is solely comprised of chase sequences, Getaway is surprisingly lackluster. The basic flow of the film is a chase scene followed by sparse dialogue that barely advances the plot. Repeat that sequence about a half-dozen times and you have the entire film. What’s worse is that the chase scenes are comprised entirely of quickly edited millisecond cuts that disguise the film’s incoherent mess as action.

There is an uninterrupted two-minute sequence towards the end of the film that I had hoped would redeem it at least a little, but it ends up being the most boring part. It’s just one car chasing another down a long stretch of road with little to no action except for the occasional car coming across the intersection. Of all the crazy stunt scenes to choose from, this is the one they decided to show uninterrupted.

Even worse than the chase sequences is the dialogue. The majority of Selena Gomez’s lines is comprised of ‘stop,’ ‘don’t,’ ‘bad driver,’ and various screams and yelps. She just has to give her two cents throughout all the chase scenes and Ethan Hawke can’t do anything about it, you know, because he’s trying to power glide the car through the next turn while the police are closing in on him. She’s that annoying pest who won’t go away no matter what.

Getaway is one of those films you should get as far away as possible from. Every aspect of the film is a gut-wrenching experience that will make you question why you paid good money to see it in the first place. Sorry, Ethan Hawke, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing in the next Fast & Furious film anytime soon.