Title: Getaway

What Are They Trying To Get Away From? Those meanies at Rotten Tomatoes, I guess.

Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: One of Sweet Tooth's ice cream trucks from Twisted Metal out of five.

Brief Plot Synopsis: Ex-race car driver destroys beautiful Shelby Mustang (and a decent sized chunk of Sofia, Bulgaria) in an attempt to save his kidnapped wife. Selena Gomez tags along because marketing.

Tagline: "Get in. Get out. Getaway."

Better Tagline: "The fast and the monotonous."

Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Brent Magna - yes, really - comes home from work one day to find the place in shambles and his wife missing. A phone call informs Brent the missus will be fine, provided he complete a series of driving-relating tasks culminating in the theft of several billion dollars. The unseen bad guy keeps tab on the action with a number of cameras installed both inside and outside the car. Accompanying Magna is an anonymous teenager (she's credited as "The Kid") who initially takes umbrage at Magna for having stolen her sweet Shelby Super Snake but predictably decides to help him. Oh, did I mention she's, like, a computer hacker? That's sort of important.

"Critical" Analysis: It seems like we're running out of names for movies. The Internet Movie Database lists 17 feature films or TV movies with some variation of "Getaway" for the title, for example so until we start using foreign languages to tell them apart (fun fact: "Getaway" in Afrikaans is "Wegbreek") we'll just have to differentiate by relative quality. Therefore, if you bring up this movie and your grandkids ask you which Getaway you're talking about, you can tell them it's the one that was so bad it caused that nice Selena Gomez girl to start shooting heroin back in '13.

Ethan Hawke, who plays BRENT MAGNA (that name just screams for all-caps), has now appeared in one of the best movies of 2013 (Before Midnight) and one of the worst (this, though some might argue for The Purge). I rarely watch pre-release publicity interviews so I have no idea if Hawke ever discusses any reasons he may have had for making this. Did he lose big at an illegal poker game? Invest heavily in Spanish banks? Maybe he's just always wanted to work with Selena Gomez. Whatever the case, it's hard to gauge his acting talents when his emoting is almost entirely limited to reacting to stuff he sees in a rearview mirror: "What the ... *more* cop cars?"

Speaking of Gomez, I'd rather not speak of Gomez. She seems like a nice kid, and though I'm largely (read: completely) unfamiliar with her work on Wizards of Waverly Place, her role in Getaway seems to have been written (or "written") by Gregg Maxwell Parker and Sean Finegan soley to see how many times they could get the former Disney princess to say, "Holy shit!"

And let's not leave director Courtney Solomon out of the indictments. An argument could be made that Solomon remains shell-shocked after the critical panning of his first two efforts: 2000's Dungeons and Dragons and 2005's An American Haunting. Both of which, to be fair, were gargantuan turds. Can we bring in an impartial mediator to negotiate a cinematic compromise? Say, Peter O'Toole agrees to unretire from acting if Solomon promises never to darken a director's chair again?

Solomon and company also nakedly pander to what (I expect) they believe Millennials are looking for in a movie experience, namely scenes that look like those YouTube police videos, a ridiculous number of edits and jump-cuts, and one final chase shot from the nose of BRENT MAGNA's car, no doubt meant to invoke the similar perspective from the Gran Turismo games. It's reminiscent of the first person shooter perspective employed in the 2005 adaptation of DOOM. That's not a good thing. And let's not even get into how The Kid "hacks into the video server" (from her iPad) and loops footage of her and Magna to fool the mysterious bad guy watching them. That sounds like something I saw in another movie, I think it was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down.

The budget for this movie was $18 million, a low enough number in this day and age, but given the "quality" of what's onscreen I still assumed it was mostly to pay off Slavic gangsters. Then I read how 130 cars were crashed during filming. 130! They could give one as compensation to everyone who pays money to see this textbook late summer dump in the theater.

See It/Rent It/Skip It: Seriously?

Getaway is in theaters today. It's such a shame about Selena Gomez.