Getaway is stratospherically stupid

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      Starring Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez. Rated PG. Now playing

      This movie is not your friend, Ethan Hawke. We’ve heard that you did some of your own stunt driving in Getaway, which was probably fun for you. Everyone totally deserves some fun, wrecking the capital of Bulgaria and its weirdly numerous cop cars, and probably killing what looks like a lot of people, on-screen. But good God, man, this thing is stratospherically stupid. And let’s not even discuss that quasi-biker ‘stache you have going on.

      This is not actually the fault of the actors. Director Courtney Solomon obviously thought that if he had more car stunts, crashes, and explosions than all the Fast & Furious movies smashed together, we wouldn’t notice that ADHD chimpanzees crafted his movie.

      Like the twin head wounds Taken and Taken 2, Getaway also features kidnapping leading to mass urban destruction. Former NASCAR driver Brent Magna (Hawke), now improbably living in Sofia, Bulgaria, discovers his wife has been snatched. Following the instruction of a “Voice” on his cellphone, Brent steals a Mustang Shelby Super Snake and drives it into things for the rest of the movie. Sorry, car-movie people: because chimps masticated then spit up the action, you will see only chimp mush, no thrills.

      We only see the Voice’s mouth as he directs Brent. (The car is rigged with cameras so we all get cam-view overdose.) The Voice sounds very like—and is—Jon Voight doing a terrible Germanic accent, and the Voice has a moronic reason for wrecking a city via muscle car. And here is the other thing: there is also “the Kid”. Yes, two main characters apparently don’t merit actual names.

      “The Kid” (Selena Gomez) becomes Brent’s passenger, for reasons again that the chimps concocted. It’s not Gomez’s fault that she’s like a cute talking chipmunk or that cute talking chipmunks are rarely believable as Einsteinian punk hackers. Sigh. Right: we, and the Super Snake, would now like to get away.

      Watch the trailer for Getaway.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      aaaa

      Sep 1, 2013 at 8:46pm

      no doubt a stellar movie, and another stellar movie review from patty.
      conversational journalism gives massive credibility to the critique