Getaway could have been a successful five-minute short about the Shelby Super Snake Mustang. It’s the hour and 25 minutes around those five decent minutes that are completely horrible.
Director Courtney Solomon’s Getaway is the one of the most boring action films I’ve ever seen. The action scenes are so fast-paced and atrociously edited, I actually felt sick in the theatre. Not even Dramamine could cure my illness as I walked out, hoping to forget what I just saw.
Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) is a former race car driver whose wife is kidnapped by a mysterious villain (Jon Voight). Brent steals a Shelby, which belongs to a young woman (Selena Gomez), and the two go on a wild goose chase around Sofia, Bulgaria, following the villain’s demands so Brent can get his wife back.
The script doesn’t even give Gomez’s character a name and Voight’s lips appear on the other end of the phone line throughout the film rather than his actual face, which means that any actor could have taken the role.
Getaway is supposedly geared towards muscle car aficionados, but the film delivers nothing but nauseating car chases and cheesy dialogue. Heck, we don’t even get many great shots of the Shelby itself, so what’s the point? It seems like the director would rather focus on the bland looks of Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez throughout the film, which ends up denying the audience what they paid to see: some fun car chasing action scenes.
Gomez has proved her acting maturity, separating herself from her Disney background, when she starred in the Harmony Korine film Spring Breakers. But it was an unwise choice for her to take this role as the girl who gets stuck in the car with Hawke. Not only is it a horrible role, in which no young actress would be able to shine, it doesn’t look good on Gomez’s resume … at all. People seeing the actress for the first time will think she is horrible, when in reality she is just victim or a poor script and bad editing.
Getaway is a film that won’t please anyone and I recommend doing exactly as the title says and run away from this film–and fast.
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