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Run Away

"Ethan Hawke, your wife has been taken. Agree to be in our movie or you will never see her again." That's pretty much how the pitch meeting for "Getaway" must have gone, because there's absolutely no other explanation for why he possibly could have agreed to star in this idiotic crash-porn excuse of a movie. To be sure, every actor has his fair share of payday movies (and in the case of Nicholas Cage, far more than his fair share) but it's hard to imagine that a production with a target audience composed solely of J.G. Ballard could afford to write a check with a whole lot of zeros on it.

Hawke ("Training Day") plays the role of Brent Magna, a disgraced race car driver who now lives in Sofia, Bulgaria, for whatever reason. In the first minute of the movie we see, in flashback, that his wife has been kidnapped and he is being forced to do whatever the mysterious voice on the other end of the phone tells him to do. And what he is told to do is to drive all over town crashing into things and not get caught by the police. To what end, he knows not. And, due to the staggering lack of characterization, the audience cares not either. Even Gary Scott Thompson knows that identifiable characters and a bit of backstory are required to push a car chase into the realm of ‘hair-raising'.

Still more mind-boggling is the fact that "Getaway" has two writers credited, Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker, both first-timers. That works out to approximately 30 seconds of story per person, followed by approximately 44.5 minutes per person of laughable dialog, absurd contrivances, rending metal and complete disregard for physics.

Selena Gomez ("Spring Breakers"), also gets herself involved in this mess somehow. For a young lady who has had a very successful career to date, one would think that she would have smarter people advising her. Playing 'The Kid', all that she really does is serve as the deus ex machina. Need to know something about cars? She's a gifted mechanic. Need to do something with computers. She can hack into them - with an iPad. Yes, an iPad. Need someone to stare blankly and without emotion? She can do that too.

The only good news about "Getaway" is that director Courtney Solomon ("An American Haunting") actually has a pretty good eye for shooting a car chase. Granted, that shouldn't be a surprise considering that the entire movie is one long car chase, but given everything else that is off the mark with this production, it's worth noting. Of course, for a director whose only credits include a horror movie that took place in 19th century and "Dungeons & Dragons", neither of which involved cars, the producers were clearly not that concerned about checking credentials. So, maybe in spite of their best efforts, he turned out to be a good choice. The long single shot from the dashboard-cam towards the end is damned impressive, for instance, and almost brings you to the edge of your seat in a way that nothing else in "Getaway" does.