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I've Made a Huge Mistake: Getaway

By Alexander Joenks | Film | August 30, 2013 |

By Alexander Joenks | Film | August 30, 2013 |


Dear Dustin,

I quit.

Best,
SLW



































Seriously though, Getaway is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I once spent a summer watching Thai martial arts movies dubbed into Russian.

This movie has no redeeming qualities. It is 85 minutes long and contains at most 85 seconds of actual content. The entire plot is three sentences long. I’m not being hyperbolic. I mean that you literally can describe every event in the movie in three sentences or less, without resorting to summarization. I won’t bother because it’s frankly not that interesting, and even reading this sentence explaining why I’m not bothering to is a more productive use of your time than reading a sentence of that plot. The plot is so nonsensical that if you relayed it to a seven year old, she would slap you with a piece of pizza and then call 911 on account of you obviously suffering a stroke.

Of the 85 minute run time, approximately 82 minutes of it is a car chase. It might be more than one. It’s really impossible to tell because of a complete inability on the part of the director to shoot the film such that’s it’s possible to tell what the hell is going on. There are lots of engines roaring, zooming by anonymous places, with no sense of actual place, movement, or direction. Ethan Hawke shifts a lot, and turns the wheel with a great deal of gusto.

He starts the car a lot too. Every time he dramatically swerved and crashed his way to a half second pause, the movie made a point of having him turn the key in the ignition to start the car. Because apparently the director of the film has never actually driven an automobile and seems to think that if the car comes to a complete stop, you have to start it again. Either that or the roar as the engine revved back to life is the only way the director can achieve an erection.

Ooh, and don’t forget the zoomed in shots of Hawke’s boots mashing on one pedal or another. I mean, that shot was repeated at least a hundred times, so much that I can only assume that the director has some sort of boot fetish on top of an engine fetish. Sometimes Hawke uses both of his feet to mash both of the pedals at the same time, which seems counter productive to me. I think the director might have actually thought that pushing both pedals would make the car go extra zoomy.

Beyond its mere stupidity and pointlessness, the film is an exercise in complete amateurism. It is made with the competence of a student film produced at the last minute by an drunk would-be director who is teetering on failing out of the third-rate film school that reluctantly decided to take his loan money.
I could look up the director’s name I suppose, but that would take more effort than he’s worth, and the film is so bad that it’s probably a hate crime to reveal the director’s identity.

At one point a power plant is blown up with a thumb drive. There’s not really any reason for it. But then there’s the obligatory shot of all the lights in the city going off. Of course, once the driving starts again fifteen seconds later and for the rest of the movie, all the buildings have lights on wherever they zoom zoom. That’s the level of complete inability to make a film that this thing boasts. If you feel that what has really held back the Fast and the Furious franchise has been too few car chases and too much coherence, then this is the film for you.

The fact that the movie ends with the twist that the villain gets away and directly tries to set itself up to have a sequel is so monumentally delusional that I can only imagine the film was made in North Korea. This thing is sitting at 2% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, with only a single positive review from Norman Wilner, who could find something complimentary to say about a vomit smoothie if it needed a quote.

This is the sort of film that should have been put on a shelf and forgotten about for the sakes of the careers of everyone involved. But nobody’s seeing it anyway, so I suppose there is some good taste left in America. College town, opening night, and I am the only person in a theater for a film with the sole draw of Selena Gomez. The summary of her performance is that she is shrill and annoying. Of course her annoying me is the solitary emotional reaction the movie managed to wring out of me in that exhausting hour and a half, so bully for her, I suppose.

They really shouldn’t have made this a PG-13 film since the only conceivable way of selling tickets to it would be to actually stick a Selena Gomez sex tape after the credits. Of course, Ms. Gomez’s virtue would remain intact, because it would be physically impossible to stay in the theater for any reason after the previous 85 minutes of soul crushing boredom.

Don’t give this film your money. It doesn’t have any entertainment value whatsoever.

Steven Lloyd Wilson is a hopeless romantic and the last scion of Norse warriors and the forbidden elder gods. His novel, ramblings, and assorted fictions coalesce at www.burningviolin.com. You can email him here and order his novel here.