Review of Getaway (2013) by Harry W — 28 Apr 2014

Well aware that director Courtney Solomon is an inexperienced and poor film maker as the creator of the critically panned Dungeons & Dragons film as well as An American Haunting, I went into Getaway to see just how he would mess up this one while also hoping for a decent lead from Ethan Hawke.

Before I delve into details, I will say that Ethan Hawke gives a decent performance. While Getaway is a far from good film, Ethan Hawke manages to give a lead performance which has a real rough edge to it. It certainly isn't his best, but his line delivery has a lot of grit and intensity to it which makes it more convincing to say that he is actually facing the situations presented to him in the film. Ethan Hawke's natural charisma manages to prove to be a mild benefit to Getaway, and it is arguably the best asset that the film has to boast because the rest is incredibly inferior.

The intro scene in Getaway attempts to summarise everything in the story such as the background of the protagonist and the motives for why he has stolen a vehicle in a sequence that flips back and fourth between flashbacks, current day events and the message that main character Brent Magna has been told as justification for him stealing a car. The pace of the film is so fast that if viewers aren't able to feel it right away, they most likely never will. If they do, then at some point during the 90 dull minutes that is Getaway, they will be worn down by its and have given up on it.

Getaway tries to be a guilty pleasure since it starts off with a car chase and doesn't stop, but in this process it skips past coherent writing, although the weakness of its screenplay is obvious. And there is essentially no plot to it.

In an attempt to "cleverly" write its excessive amount of cinematography angles into the story, Getaway dictates that the reason there are so many cameras in and around the car are because there is an unnamed man simply called "The Voice" who is watching everything inside and outside the car from various cameras which somehow manage to survive the various things that the car hits and come out just fine. There are way too many camera angles that Yaron Levy goes for which proves that he is an inexperienced cinematographer. In a good race or chase movie, the cameras should be more focused on capturing the stunts from a decent distance to reveal the full spectacle of things while in Getaway the camera gets up way to close with everything as it is happening. Every time a small part of the car bumps something, the camera cuts to that and then instantly to the next one. The editing is way too fast and incoherent and it attempts to capture around five camera angles all at once in all the fast paced scenes. The editing deviates between all the angles from inside the car, outside the car and from a distant third person perspective. There isn't enough interesting going on for it to capture and it doesn't capture it well at all. While the cinematography and editing isn't nearly as bad as in Taken 2 or A Good Day to Die Hard, it still fits the context of being very poor form and going into an excessive overkill.

And the musical score has its moments but as a whole is repetitive, generic and reminiscent of every musical score from essentially every racing film ever made. But the one flaw that stands out above all the technical problems is the performance of Selena Gomez.

I don't know who the hell gave Justin Bieber's ex-girlfriend a role in Getaway because although it is clearly a desperate attempt to capitalise on her fame for the teenage crowds, but the instant she came on screen dressed like her ex-boyfriend when he attempts to act "gansta" and pointing a gun at Ethan Hawke I instantly knew that she was a fatal casting error. I don't know if Selena Gomez can act, but she certainly can not convincingly point a gun at Ethan Hawke or be the slightest bit intimidating. And from there she never shuts up. She keeps delivering the poorly conceived dialogue of the film in the most cardboard way possible which reminds us why she is a prime example of the shallow musicians of today who are bereft of any substance instead of style that attempt unsuccessfully to cross over into the acting world. Selena Gomez's crossing is an unsuccessful and unbearable one, one of the worst miscasts I have ever seen in any movie ever. Seriously she is so goddamn annoying that every time she spoke I wanted to punch her square in the face. There is not a single word that she says convincingly, and the fact that the dialogue is already terrible enough just reinforces the weakness of her character and her acting skill. And along with her excessively repetitive line delivery is the fact that her facial gestures never change. They stay frozen with the exact same look as she expresses literally no emotions whatsoever. As weird as it is for me to say, Selena Gomez is actually a worse actress in Getaway than Kristen Stewart was in Twilight because while Kristen Stewart gave an awful acting performance, at least she tried. It didn't seem like she was trying, but she did, and her poorly conceived character fitted into the nature of the poorly conceived story. Selena Gomez does not fit into anything whatsoever at all and is a lot more annoying than Kristen Stewart. Luckily enough, The Golden Raspberry Awards realised this and nominated her for the Worst Actress award. Though the prestigious trophy ended up going to Tyler Perry for his performance in A Madea Christmas, I cannot honestly imagine him being more annoying than Selena Gomez in Getaway. Selena Gomez does nothing in Getaway except give viewers reasons to criticise her and joke about her, and it builds no credibility for her whatsoever.

So despite a decent leading performance from Ethan Hawke, Getaway owes too much to the many superior racing films that inspired it such as the original Gone in 60 Seconds and fails to pay it back to them by filling its excessively fast paced 90 minutes with excessive overkill of poor cinematography, choppy editing a repetitive musical score and a truly dreadful performance from Selena Gomez.