“Getaway” is so bad that what’s most surprising about it is that Nicolas Cage didn’t manage to star in it. But one man can only do so many low-rent projects a year.
Instead, it’s Ethan Hawke, who (for some reason) is in Sofia, Bulgaria, where his wife is kidnapped while decorating the Christmas tree. A mysterious off-screen supervillain (voiced by Jon Voight, doing a German accent) instructs Hawke, who we learn is a retired pro race-car driver named Brent, to steal a hot Mustang.
Then, with The Voice giving nutty instructions over the car speakers and watching on video monitors, Brent must go tearing around Sofia smashing into things, evading police and perhaps killing innocents along the way. At one stop, he gets a gun pointed at him by a teenage girl (Selena Gomez) who tells him he’s driving her ride — a Shelby GT500 Super Snake. Needless to say, the car does the best acting in the movie, and as for dialogue, I’ll take the Shelby’s purring and vrooming over anything the humans come up with.
About 19/20ths of the way through, there is a smooth, extended take filmed from the dashboard of the car as it muscles its way through traffic. It’s momentarily hypnotic. The shot is reminiscent of “C’Etait Un Rendez-Vous,” the breathless single-take 1976 film by Claude Lelouch about a hell-bent, extremely illegal eight-minute drive through Paris at dawn. It stands as one of the greatest hot-rod movies ever made (and saves you 82 minutes of filler compared to “Getaway”).
Ethan Hawke stars in a wipeout of a car-chase movie in “Getaway.” (Warner Bros. Picture)
If all of “Getaway” were as smooth and seductive as that single late scene, I’d have no complaints about the ridiculously contrived plot, or the uselessness of Gomez, who is such a doll-like figure that it’s as if Minnie Mouse were sitting next to Hawke spewing obscenities, supplying exposition and flipping off the bad guys. (We get it, Selena: After this and “Spring Breakers,” you’re no longer a Disney kid. So what?)
But even as a thin excuse for a series of car chases, “Getaway” — which isn’t actually about a getaway but hopes to make you think of the unrelated 1972 Steve McQueen chase film “The Getaway” — wipes out.
As directed by Courtney Solomon (“An American Haunting”), the chases are a meaningless salad of imagery, the editing so fast and furious that you never have the time to figure out where objects are in relation to one another. And after a few minutes of hurtle and whoosh, you start to think Solomon doesn’t know either, and is whipping everything together in a Cuisinart of confusion in an effort to fool you into thinking that something exciting is going on.
Instead, you’ll quickly realize that the only rule in the chase scenes is that everyone but Hawke and his passenger will go splat. I lost track of how many times police cars and motorcycles would zip up alongside the Shelby, only to get smooshed up against walls, slammed into pillars or sent tumbling off into the night sky.
Meanwhile, in the car, the Gomez kid (the script doesn’t even bother to give her a name — edgy!) manages effortlessly to outwit the supervillain, who has cameras hooked up all over the car as he instructs Brent to, for instance, pointlessly hurtle though a Christmas market and attendant crowds of pedestrians in a park.
The kid simply hooks up an iPad, punches a couple of buttons, and bam: She has overridden all of the car’s surveillance systems and replaced the video monitoring feed with an endlessly repeating three-second loop of her and Brent sitting obediently, when actually they’re foiling all the evil plans. Never mind that no one is going to be fooled by a three-second video loop for more than six seconds.
Ordered to shoot his passenger, Brent refuses. So the bad guy does . . . nothing. (In fact, he even praises Brent for making the right call.)
At another point, surrounded by cops with pistols drawn, Brent starts waving a gun in the air. In my reading of police behavior, this is generally considered an invitation to pump off about 500 rounds in the general direction of the suspect’s head, but instead, Bulgaria’s Finest simply back off and let Brent escape. C’mon, guys, this perp is responsible for the deaths of maybe dozens of your brothers in uniform. At least give him a noogie or something to let him know he’s been naughty.