memento_mori's Movie Review of Getaway (2013)

Fifteen Minutes of Shame.
memento_mori - wrote on 09/12/13

If there was ever a time where I didn't want to talk about a movie, it's now.

I can't enjoy stupid movies. I just can't. I wanted to like this, because it was late at night and I was out with friends, a great setting.
Getaway is what you get when you hire an autistic person to write the next Bourne series. Ethan Hawke is having a really wobbly year with the excellent Before Midnight, the poorly-received Purge and now this. This insult to cinema.

Selena Gomez is in this movie. Yeah. You'd think they would at least make her nice to look at, but no. They didn't even allow us that single luxury. She is like five teenage Jar-Jar Binkses in a fast car. She should stay out of music and she should definitely stay out of movies, because she has no idea how to pass something off as a reaction in a situation of distress. My favorite part of the film was Ethan Hawke telling her to shut up.

The characters are some of the worst I've ever seen. It has actors who are generally trying (but failing), but they don't have anything to work around with these plastic vessels. How are we supposed to feel sorry for Ethan Hawke if all we know about him is his name, that his wife was kidnapped and that he used to do some professional driving thingy?

The direction looks like a music video from the late 90's, edited by a twelve-year-old. Quick shots and edits of cars crashing and Hawke changing gears twenty times in ten seconds. The lack of actors in this movie was probably because they exhausted their budget by crashing too many cars. Couldn't they afford some extras?

The script is most possibly the worst feature. The locations are stupid (Bulgaria at Christmas with no snow?), all villains are Germans (and only know how to say crap in German) and the dialogue goes something like this:

Drive fast and crash into things!
I can't do that.
DO IT.
Okay.

This film's non-existent villain is... Well, calling him an idiot would be an insult to idiots. I don't pay ten dollars to watch 90 minutes of the lower half of Jon Voight's face. Watching him slurping and chewing on food was borderline.

Painful to get through, poorly shot, horrendously acted, this year's Battleship. My expectations were at a complete low, but what I got was way worse than I had anticipated.
It lives off its product placement of Apple and McDonald's, offers nothing new in the way of action, fails to develop any reasoning or plot and has no ambition other than gently reaching into your pocket and taking out a ten dollar bill. And they're making a sequel. It's a ruthless, nonsensical cash-grab.