Getaway (2013) [Blu-ray]
Action | Crime

The clock is ticking as former race car driver Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) barrels around the streets of Bulgaria to save his abducted wife. Inside a commandeered Ford Shelby GT500 Super Snake, a desperate Brent obeys the anonymous voice coming through the speaker as it sets him and his unwitting passenger (Selena Gomez) on a series of increasingly dangerous tasks. If they fail, Brent's wife will die. With every cop in the city in hot pursuit, the two strangers must find a way to flee or fight back against their faceless assailant in this breakneck, heart-pounding race against time.

Storyline: Getaway is the gritty, exciting action thriller from Warner Brothers in which former race car driver Brent Magna is pitted against the clock as he commandeers a custom Shelby Super Snake Mustang, taking it and its unwitting owner on a high-speed adventure at the command of a mysterious villain on a race against time to save the life of his kidnapped wife. Written by anonymous

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Kenneth Brown on December 18, 2013 -- And the non-prize for Worst Film of 2013 goes to... no contest, no surprise: Courtney Solomon's Getaway! Starring an leagues-above-his-pay-grade Ethan Hawke, a fresh-off-the-set-of-Spring Breakers Selena Gomez, and Jon Voight's bulging eyes. How exactly Getaway made it off the studio lot is a mystery; why anyone thought to greenlight it even more so. Its 21-car pileup script is an underdeveloped mess. Its 5-Hour Energy Drink performances are as irritating as its laughably high-strung dialogue. Its bleary cinematography amounts to minimalism gone horribly, horribly wrong, and that's being kind. Its story and plotting implausible and mindless. I swore long ago to do my all to come up with something -- anything -- positive about any and every movie I review. Getaway admittedly isn't the first time I've broken that vow, and it won't be the last. Sometimes, though, a film is so positively awful, so deliriously dismal that the only remotely good thing about it is the rolling of the end credits.

Ex-racer Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) is on the move, and the clock is ticking. It seems his wife (a briefly glimpsed Rebecca Budig) was kidnapped by a man known only as The Voice (Jon Voight), who's directing Magna's every step via phone in a Shelby Mustang wired with multiple cameras and listening devices. If Brent follows The Voice's every command, his wife lives. If he doesn't? Things won't go so well for Mrs. Magna. Matters are soon complicated by The Kid (Selena Gomez), a feisty young carjacker who gets pulled into The Voice's sick game. (Brent is initially ordered to kill her, but refuses. Does his wife die? No! Instead, The Voice essentially says, gotcha! That's what you should have done! So much for rule #1 of "Do What I Say or Lose Your Loved Ones.") As the night blazes on, Brent leads the police on a high speed chase down the streets of Stupid, veering down alley after alley of Idiotic.

Getaway is noisy and dull. And worse, dim-witted. The cops are brainless, faceless action-movie fodder; the villain apparently a long lost member of the Gruber family; our hero a morally inept do-gooder, as unlikable and shout-y as he is thinly realized and poorly conceived. The chase scenes, meanwhile, are laughably bad, heaping improbably sharp turns atop ludicrously successful stunts (and one staircase descent) to increasingly disappointing ends. Whereas the Fast & Furious franchise at least digs deep into its bag of Big Dumb Fun, Getaway takes itself much too seriously, wasting any talent on screen with a misguided, mismanaged, incoherently edited string of narrow misses; near-death encounters that darkly leave one hoping the next scene will involve Hawke and Gomez being ejected from the Shelby, followed by a quick -- and permanent -- cut to black. The Voice wins! What else is on?


If there were some redeeming value to Getaway, I'd latch on. As is, the only questions I keep coming back to involve the actors. How did Hawke get roped into such a misfire? Why did Gomez, inexperienced or no, even entertain the script? Who was tasked with getting Voight drunk enough to sign on? Granted, none of their IMDB pages are spotless. But Solomon's track record didn't throw up any warning signs? No of their agents advised caution? Is Solomon really so convincing that the film, at any stage in its development, sounded like anything more than a mangled direct-to-video crash waiting to happen? Already a box office bomb and a frontrunner in this year's Razzies, watch for Hawke, Gomez and Voight to quietly begin pretending Getaway doesn't exist. I'm going to do the same.

Getaway is hands down the worst movie I've sat through in 2013. Maybe even in the last few years. It reaches for memorability, but comes up so short it will only be remembered for being so awful. I'm sure someone, somewhere will have a blast with it, and I'm happy you're out there. It means a film like this will find an audience, no matter how small, and at least lend some value to its existence. Thankfully, Warner's Blu-ray will please the fans Solomon's misfire assembles. Its video presentation isn't pretty but it's fairly faithful and its DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track delivers high-octane thrills. Its supplemental package is a six-minute wash, but so it goes with box office bombs. I'd recommend renting this one if you can't resist seeing for yourself. Keep that hard-earned cash in your pocket until you know for sure whether Getaway's brand of brainlessness is to your liking.

[CSW] -0.4- A repetitive, boring, repetitive, police chase, car chase action flick. What a terrible script with no character development and no chemistry between the only two characters in the entire movie. This has got to be some of the dumbest characters ever written. With endless car chase scenes and no real plot it made me feel like I must have inhaled too much of the exhaust from all those the car chase scenes. This has got to be one of the most pathetic movies I ever tried to watch.
[V3.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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