Review: Getaway (2013)

Directed by: Courtney Solomon | 86 minutes | action, crime, thriller | Actors: Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight, Rebecca Budig, Paul Freeman, Bruce Payne, Ivaylo Geraskov, Dimo ​​Alexiev, Velislav Pavlov, Dejan Angelov, Kaloian Vodenicharov, Danko Jordanov

The clock is ticking as former NASCAR driver Brent Magna tears the roads of Eastern European Bulgaria to rescue his kidnapped wife. In a Ford Shelby Mustang GT500 Super Snake, desperate Brent obeys the anonymous voice from the loudspeaker that gives him and his unsuspecting female passenger increasingly dangerous commands. If one of the assignments fails, Brent’s wife will die. While the driving pair are feverishly chased by the police, it’s a matter of fighting or fleeing from their mysterious assailant in a nerve-racking race against time.

Although the plot of “Getaway” suggests that the film also contains the necessary thriller elements, the film is primarily a wildly active vehicle. Collisions, explosions, chases in busy streets or even straight through normally peaceful city parks, overturned and blown up police cars, it’s all there. So it is food for enthusiasts like “The Fast and the Furious”. The problem is that the wild chases and crashing cars in “Getaway” become so prominent that the film is further devoid of any substantive substance. In the beginning the action scenes are still entertaining at times, but in the end it all becomes very monotonous and the film sinks into a deep pool of roaring engine violence.

There is absolutely no question of any form of character development, while the story told in “Getaway” is also a sloppily woven little thing. We also receive very little information about the background and motives of the mysterious gentleman that holds Brent’s wife hostage.

The protagonists Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez do not deliver outright shoddy work, but they also rarely really impress. The switch between the action segments, which are often shot with HD cameras, and the more granular, more abstract intermezzos, sometimes turns out quite stylistically and occasionally gives the film a little extra cachet.

But in the end, “Getaway” is mostly a lot of screaming and little wool. Some moments do betray some potential, but in the end, “Getaway” gets bogged down a bit too much in overworked power and the print is too monotonous to really be fascinating for an hour and a half.