Ethan Hawke has to drive around a European city very fast in order to save his kidnapped wife in the thriller Getaway. Review right after the jump.
Will contain spoilers.
Its Christmas time and the impossibly named Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) returns to a ransacked home to find his wife missing. He is then told that he needs to steal a special car from a car-park and do a series of silly tasks around a European city. Tasks like, run a red light, drive into a truck carrying bottled water and knock over some market stalls. 
After parking up, a girl whose name is never mentioned (Selena Gomez) tries to carjack Hawke by gunpoint but is soon brought along for the ride. It turns out that this teenager is the real owner of the Shelby Super Snake Mustang car and she wants it back, but the man behind the whole plan and telling Hawke what to do has plans for the girl too.
Getaway is quite a bit sloppy for a film with such stars. The majority of the film is spent on Hawke and Gomez getting chased by police cars. It ends up being like one of those ‘World’s stupidest car chases’ TV shows. It is basically car crash after car crash. Yes, the stunts do look good but they should have been used sparingly. It is overkill.
The plot to the film is also a rip-off of hit action films that came before – mostly Speed and Taken. The bad guy has somehow put loads of cameras in the car and watches their every movement, like Dennis Hopper did to the bus in Speed. Gomez also manages to loop the footage so they can have a plan of their own, like in Speed.
The writers and director of Getaway also try to surprise and shock the viewers with the bad guy. They never show his full face and, when they capture someone at the end; it turns out to be a decoy. But for every single person who has seen a film with Jon Voight in it, you will see that the twist is very poorly executed.
Hawke and Gomez aren’t bad but the real star of the show is the Shelby Super Snake Mustang. The car looks incredible throughout and I hope the manufacturers read this review and send me one. Watch this if you love fast cuts of speeding cars, for everyone else, I wouldn’t bother.
And on that note, I will give Getaway one and a half Shelby Super Snakes out of five.
