Warning: this is not to be confused with various other movies called The Getaway, but believe me, you wouldn't.
Second warning: Getaway might have annoyed me so much I'm going to suggest there would be little difference between director Courtney Solomon's efforts and that of a stuffed monkey.
The wife (Rebecca Budig) of former race car and later escape car driver Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke, who needed the money, one hopes) is kidnapped by an evil nameless mastermind (a role so difficult, the film has to use unpleasant close-ups of Jon Voight's face and the voice of Paul Freeman to embody him, because a single actor could not be clichéd yet boring enough for this particular masterpiece of filmmaking). Mastermind then has Brent race all around Sofia in a stolen car as part of a loud, car-crashing fiendish evil plan. Because our villain is especially cruel, he also has Brent pick up the actual owner of the car, a girl without a name (played by Selena Gomez who probably has youth as her excuse) who just happens to be the most annoying person who ever lived; also, she's of course a car freak and computer wiz and the daughter of the boss of a very large investment bank.
Lots of car crashes ensue; stupidity never stops.
Generally, I'd love to be the one to say that Getaway, despite what everyone else on the Internet says, is actually a misunderstood hidden gem. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep a straight face for a lie this huge for very long.
As you probably understand, Getaway is stupid on a level that makes even the worst of Luc Besson's Europa Corp productions look well thought out and intelligent. The big difference is that Besson's movies generally show some (sometimes even more) imagination sandwiched between the idiocies - though it's often a very stupid kind of imagination - whereas Getaway's imagination stops at "car crash fun, hurr hurr".
Which, you know, still could result in an entertaining movie if the director responsible (and I mean responsible), Courtney Solomon, who just happens to also carry the blame for the first Dungeons & Dragons film, would even demonstrate the faintest idea of how to film car chases in an exciting, possibly even varied manner, seeing that about ninety percent of his movie consist of…wait for it…car chases. Clearly, he doesn't, so we get a lot of fast cuts between unexciting shots, and the sort of action choreography which not just doesn't bother to clearly show what's going on but is so misguided I'm pretty convinced nobody involved in the staging of these scenes knows what's supposed to be going on in them themselves. What's even worse: nothing on screen suggests any ideas about any other aspect of filmmaking either.
I'm not usually somebody to say you could probably have replaced a director with a stuffed monkey, but really, how could the resulting film be worse than what Solomon's Getaway delivers?
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