That engine starts revving and tires start burning within the first two minutes of the film, and they barely stop for the rest of it, as Magna is directed around the streets of Sofia (we are, for complicated reasons, in Bulgaria) by the German-accented voice of the man who has kidnapped his wife, and will kill her unless he helps … do something. What, exactly, remains vague.
A movie like Getaway really only has one deceptively simple job: to punch the viewer repeatedly in the adrenal gland for a little while and leave them feeling like they’ve been in the chase themselves. It’s obvious Solomon knows his reference points: the Christmas setting, the German villain with motives obscured by a little bait and switch, the spouse in peril, they all scream Die Hard, while the near-constant fast-car action, the odd-couple bickering between male and female leads, the villain giving instructions from afar come from Speed. (Which itself was, of course, billed as Die Hard on a Bus.)
What Solomon fails to recognize in those films is their essential simplicity, and he unnecessarily complicates his film with too many ill-considered twists surrounding the shadowy motivations of that Teutonic voice.
He also complicates things with the ridiculously implausible character he gives Gomez to play, a plot-hole panacea meant to lead the script out of whatever corner it has gotten itself into at any given time. She’s a spoiled rich kid, a muscle-car gearhead, a super-genius hacker who can tap into any network in 30 seconds on an iPad and a brilliant tactician to boot.
Turns out that car — which Magna is ordered to steal at the very start of the movie, the better to carry out The Voice’s plan — belongs to her as well. Why a 20-year-old trust-fund brat needs not just a fast car, but an armored, virtually indestructible fast car, is a mystery solved only when you consider that it’s required by the plot. That’s just one of the questions you can’t help but ask while watching the film, unless you can reduce your neurological functioning to brain stem-only.
All that aside, Getaway might still eke out a pass if the car chases could earn one on their own. But the best hot-pursuit flicks thrive by speeding just on the edge of plausibility. The chases in The French Connection and Bullitt, say, work because the directors of those films thought about just how much disbelief we in the audience might be willing to suspend.
Solomon demonstrates no such consideration here; the chase sequences, despite the immediacy created by the onboard POV cameras used to film them, start with cartoonish as their baseline and grow more outlandish from there. At one point, after the success of a particularly ridiculous tactic, Hawke utters the movie’s definitive line: “I can’t believe that worked.”
Yeah, us either.
9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001))
