“Getaway” is complete and utter madness from start to finish, and the worst part about it is that director Courtney Solomon insists we take it seriously. The tone is dark and gritty, and the picture is shot (by Yaron Levy) in a raw, hand-held style, but the action is over-the-top and cartoonish. It’s as if Solomon is saying, “Here are these completely ludicrous and stupid action scenarios, but we’re presenting them in a realistic, hardboiled manner, so you need to take it seriously.”
He wants to have it both ways, but, unfortunately, these are two totally different styles that, when mixed together, undermine each other.
The only fun that can be had while watching “Getaway” is from unintentional hilarity, though I wouldn’t call that much of a recommendation.
The movie gets going right away. Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke, doing the best he can in a poorly written role) comes home to find that his living room has been trashed and his wife is missing. In overly dramatic, black-and-white flashbacks — resembling the cheaply produced “dramatic reenactments” one would see in a show like “America’s Most Wanted” — we find out that his wife has been kidnapped by thugs and is being held hostage in some grimy dungeon.
Magna gets a call from an unknown person, instructing him to go to a parking garage, steal an armored sports car that’s been outfitted with video and audio surveillance and carry out a series of car-related tasks or else his’s wife will be killed.
Along the way, Magna encounters the car’s actual owner, a pesky 17-year-old girl (Selena Gomez), who accompanies him on the ride.
Jon Voight is the unknown man — actually, it’s Voight’s mouth, neck, hands and occasional eye. He’s a mysterious guy, and we’re not supposed to know his identity. He’s even identified as “The Voice” in the credits.
Voight’s character tells him to drive recklessly through a crowded park, crashing into objects like a water tank and a stage. Then he tells Magna to lose the police in four minutes, for some unknown reason. In short, he’s supposed to cause as much mindless destruction as he possibly can while in a car.
And at one point, Magna is driving on a train track while being pursued by even more cops, and through some fancy maneuvering, he makes one of the cars smash into a fuel tank that explodes, causing a chain reaction of fuel-tank explosions all along the track. (Did Solomon and screenwriters Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker really expect us to take this nonsense seriously, just because there’s a woman in peril?)
By now, I should mention that Magna is a burnt-out a racecar driver.
This is where the girl comes in: She knows a lot about technology (at one point, in an homage to “Speed,” she hacks into Voight’s command center and puts a video of them doing nothing on a continuous loop to buy them some time), and she pretty much sounds out every development in the plot to both Magna and the audience.
She’s the brainy (as well as the tough angst-y teenage girl) sidekick, but she’s also a rich spoiled brat who doesn’t stop talking during the entire movie. While Magna is doing his glorified joyriding, she tells him to slow down, but then she tells him to go faster. She has a different verbal reaction to everything he does — she’s almost unbearable.
After Magna and the girl (known as “The Kid” in the credits) embark on their wild ride, “Getaway” becomes one gloomy, chaotic and exhausting chase sequence after another. Editor Ryan Dufrene must have been on a sugar-high when he cut together the movie: It’s constantly cutting back and forth, showing us every angle and view of the car, along with a few abrupt close-ups of Magna’s face or his foot as it pushes down on the accelerator.
Even worse, when that madness isn’t happening, we’re subjected to excruciatingly painful dialogue exchanges between Brent and The Kid — it’s what Finegan and Parker think is banter.
The movie is only ninety minutes, but it feels like two hours. Solomon and Co. basically tell us that all of the madness and stupidity that came before was, ultimately, for nothing, making an already-terrible movie even more terrible and worthless.
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