'Getaway': car-chase thriller can't outrun dreadful reviews

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Selena Gomez in July 2013, just before the release of “Star Dance,” her first album since starring in the movie “Spring Breakers.” (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

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We’re serious about this one. Dating mega-famous tween heartthrob Justin Bieber in 2011 only amplified Gomez’s fame. Sure, she might have gained new fans, might have lost old ones -- heck, she was even threatened by some for kissing the Biebs, but the attention put her name all over the entertainment map. In this photo, the two are about to lock lips at a Lakers game. Before Bieber, Gomez dated “Twilight” star Taylor Lautner. And who can forget her first love, Jonas Brother Nick Jonas? (Noel Vasquez / Getty Images)

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By 2011, Selena swapped her lapel microphone for one with a cord when she began hosting MTV award shows. She started by lending her talents to MTV’s VMA pre-show, where she was polite and pleasant. Things changed when she filmed the promotion video to host MTV’s Europe Music Awards two months later. Gomez got a whole lot “grown up” with the use of slight profanity and a new gangster inspired look. (Here, Gomez attends the Fulfillment Fund’s Star Gala in Beverly Hills, a week before she hosted the EMAs.) (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)

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Hitting new heights, or perhaps trying to shed her squeaky-clean Disney image, Gomez starred in the just-in-time for spring 2012 movie “Spring Breakers,” directed by Harmony Korine, pictured center, of the famed “Kids,” “Gummo” and “Mister Lonely.” Gomez performed some pretty intense scenes, including one in which she said costar James Franco’s rapper-gangster character tried to influence her through emotional exploitation. “There were real moments in there,” Gomez said of that particular scene to The Times. “The way [Franco] was reacting really freaked me out.” (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

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Gomez returns to her hometown of Dallas to perform the halftime show at the Minnesota Vikings vs. Dallas Cowboys football game on Thanksgiving Day 2013. A Dallas Cowboys fan, Gomez tweeted, “Feels SO good to be home. Hi Dallas. I hope I make TX proud.” (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)

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Starring in another indie film, Gomez plays an angry girlfriend coping with the death of her beau in the dark film “Rudderless.” Gomez poses above with the film’s director, William H. Macy, left, and actor Billy Crudup, during the film’s promotional tour at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

By Oliver Gettell

Aug. 30, 2013 8:45 AM PT

After starring in one of the year’s best-reviewed films -- “Before Midnight” -- Ethan Hawke now has the dubious distinction of starring in one of the worst as well: “Getaway.” Whereas “Midnight” notched a “98% fresh” rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Hawke’s latest movie, a car-chase thriller co-starring Selena Gomez, had a 1% rating as of Friday morning, which means that basically everyone hated it.

In The Times, Sheri Linden called “Getaway” a “video game posing as a movie, a preposterously plotted kidnapping story starring a high-performance Mustang.” Regarding the action, Linden wrote, “The ludicrous pileup of crushed chassis, mostly from cop cars sent colliding, flying, rolling and burning, grows quickly numbing.”

As far as the acting, “Gomez occupies a register consisting of one note, and it’s not a convincing one. Hawke has considerably more range, although when worry crosses his face, you suspect he’s thinking about the script.” That script, by Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker, “has all the gleam and precision of a rusty butter knife.”

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Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune found the movie “terrible but, in its squealing way, sporadically fun-terrible.” The action “is hacked up into messily edited bits,” with one exception — an effective extended POV shot toward the end of the film. “The rest of ‘Getaway,’ which many in the audience seemed to genuinely hate based on comments on the way out, is so mechanical and derivative, not even the abducted-spouse routine can stoke the audience’s rooting interests.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s John DeFore said Hawke and Gomez “have no chemistry, which you’d think might hobble a film in which they’re locked in a car together for around 70 minutes. But ‘Getaway’ seems built for non-English speaking territories in which dialog is as disposable as Bulgarian police cars.” (The film was shot in that country’s capital.) “If only those audiences were as dumb as the action itself.”

USA Today’s Scott Bowles called “Getaway” a “90-minute migraine that wants to cross-pollinate ‘Fast & Furious’ with ‘Taken.’ Instead, it manages to be just a shadow of both.” Bowles added, “The true wonder of ‘Getaway’ is how it managed to lure recognizable stars, including an Oscar nominee [Hawke], an Academy Award winner in [Jon] Voight (or his lower lip, which gets most of the screen time) and a tweener sensation in Gomez. … Whatever the reason, moviegoers will benefit from heeding this title’s advice to get away.”

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The Wrap’s Todd Gilchrist declared the film “an endless, noisy montage of chases and collisions stitched together by perfunctory exposition whose most interesting character is quite literally a disembodied voice.” He added, “the film’s one unique achievement is in avoiding any similarities to either Sam Peckinpah or Roger Donaldson’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel ‘[The] Getaway,’ and yet managing to be even more derivative than if it were a third one.”

The Associated Press’s Jake Coyle also found “Getaway” over-familiar. He wrote, “Cribbing from countless adrenaline-fueled concept films, from ‘Speed’ to any Jason Statham movie you like, ‘Getaway’ … tries to ride its thin concept, hoping the fumes of constant engine revving are intoxicating.” Alas, it does not succeed: “Its chief tension derives from the question many moviegoers will ask, biting their nails: Is this the worst movie I’ve seen this year?”

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