Getaway

Sometimes I wonder how certain movies actually get made.  When we went to see Getaway this question arose. 

Getaway

The premise of Getaway is fairly simple.  A former race car driver, Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) gets a mysterious phone call one day. He is told that his wife Leanne (Rebecca Budig) has been kidnapped.  If Brent wants to see her again he must follow the instructions that he receives on the phone. Brent is told to steal a car located in a certain parking garage, a souped out Shelby Cobra. The car is also full of cameras and mikes so that the mysterious voice (Jon Voight) on the phone can keep track of our race car driver forced to turn criminal.  Soon Brent is being forced to drive all over Sofia, Bulgaria wreaking all sorts of mayhem.

Early in the film a young woman (Selena Gomez - Disney star of Wizards of Waverly Place) tries to car jack the Shelby and ends up along for the ride against her will.  It turns out that the car stolen was hers, and she is a rich daddy's girl who loves computers and car racing.

Plausability / Watchability

The film gets tiresome very quickly.  Most of the 'action' consists of poorly choreographed scenes of countless car chases and a high count of police cars being totalled.  Perhaps director Courtney Solomon grew up on Dukes of Hazzard episodes, I don't know.   

The film has many huge gaps in it.  One of our favorites watching Getaway was a scene in which Hawke and Gomez must blow up  a power plant in the center of Sofia.   We see the power plant explode completely with the Shelby racing out ahead of lots of explosions. We then see an overhead shot of the whole power grid going down.  Sofia is now dark and completely without power.  We then see Hawke and Gomez racing down the streets to get away. The streets are all completely lit up by the streetlamps. The shops they pass all have their signs and windows lit up like any city at night.  Didn't the power just go off?  Why does everyone have power when the power plant was just demolished?

The movie throughout establishes that Selena's Shelby is very fast; Ethan Hawke outruns many a police car with it (in fact every single one of them). In one scene where the tables are turned for a moment, Hawke must chase one of the bad guys who is driving a large Mercedes Benz SUV.  Now of course, the souped up Shelby Cobra fails to overtake that car.

While watching the film, we counted many inconsistencies.  Selena's character is able to retrieve and download account access codes from a secure bank in Sofia.  Of course despite numerous bang ups and bad guys, both Hawke and Gomez suffer nary a scratch, but since that happens in most films of this genre, I forgave that.

However, the film was just overall so stupid, that it was much more fun to count the mistakes than to actually pay attention to the overblown action.


Acting

I like Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez, but their chemistry wasn't that good in the movie.  Hawke has starred in numerous films, including one of my favorites Gattaca.  As a romantic lead, he has starred in the acclaimed Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, Before Midnight movies with July Delpy.  Here, Ethan just isn't even really given the opportunity to act. 

Selena Gomez, of course is the fresh faced Disney actress who started off as a rival singer of Hannah Montana's and then moved to her own series, Wizards of Waverly Place.  Getaway was her first role in an adult movie. It was not a great first choice. Her character just wasn't believable in this film, and since the film overall was terrible, I would tell her to drop it from her resume.

Direction

Courntey Solomon directed Getaway, I suppose if I had read his filmography, I never would have had any hope for this film anyway. His previous credits include An American Haunting and Dungeons & Dragons.

Summary

I don't know how or why this film was made.   It was just terrible all the way around.   So many things didn't make sense. The film doesn't offer anything at all to allow you to suspend disbelief.   I would getaway from this film and avoid it, even as a DVD rental.

Recommend this product? No