Getaway (2013), PG-13, 0 stars

Selena Gomez and Ethan Hawke are having the ride of their lives.

I do not really think that this review should be considered a serious review. When you have car pictures, it is a suggestion that a director is creating a movie full of craftsmanship staging the car chases, the explosions, and the neat car tricks. I think I was describing Fast and Furious 6. This movie is not in the same league in terms of the craftsmanship.

Brent (Ethan Hawke) is a former NASCAR race car driver who is exhausted with unfortunate and unpretentious luck. He returns home to Bulgaria where he finds his little habitat unsatisfying and messy and does not hear from his wife (Rebecca Budig). A mysterious voice (Jon Voight) calls Brent and informs him that if Brent does not follow the instructions clearly as told, then his wife will die. I have heard this formula many times and the premise is familiar and is basically a straight-forward predictable march or drive to the end.

There's also references from other movies such as the Fast and Furious movies and "Speed". Brent steals a car with surveillance cameras and microphones and lures the police into a high-speed car chase. It would have been fine if it were a regular high speed car chase viewed on TV as breaking news. As a movie, it is incomprehensible and as the movie gets worse, Selena Gomez plays "The Kid", a computer hacker who is taken along for the ride because the script puts the character in there for not an interesting reason. She becomes a helper than an annoyance to Hawke's character, but a bore to me.

Oh, look, a car chase. *facepalm*

What's wrong with this movie? Answer: everything. This is not an interesting or intelligent story. It's basically like watching a first draft or first rough cut of the movie. The movie is just simply vacuous after it was finished, all I remembered was "the guy from "Training Day" and the Disney actress was in a movie with a car and fire and steam. Oh yeah, and there was Jon Voight's voice and the wife." Ethan Hawke is just simply of no interest and feels tired in the movie. Selena Gomez is just there for a paycheck. Nothing more. And, we do not get to see Voight that much.

The car chases are tiring with some CGI in the background in the sequences. There are definitely editing and continuity errors. The dialogue between Gomez and Hawke is as laughable as I could have imagined. Even, when we find out why the wife was kidnapped from the start, I groaned with so much aggravation. Were the executives, director, writer, and other investors serious about putting this movie on screen? I guess so. We're stuck with the movie. Ethan Hawke has had an interesting year with Before Midnight, one of the best films of the year, The Purge, a pretty bad horror movie with a neat premise, and this movie which one of the worst films of the year, if not the worst. It is a contender with Movie 43.

This movie was just a noisy, incomprehensible storyline with a waste of money invested in these good-looking cars to see them trashed on screen. I feel really bad for the CEO and makers who built the manufactured cars. Guys, my sincerest condolences.

ZERO