ETHAN HAWKE & SELENA GOMEZ IN GETAWAY

year: 2013 cast: Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight, Paul Freeman, Bruce Payne rating: **

For an opening weekend tally, a 3.9 on imdb provides fair warning to casual moviegoers, although for someone into cult films, this might result in a worthwhile two-hour bag fest. But GETAWAY isn't the kind of flick that jovially stinks up the room. There’s just not much of a story past the plot description...

A former race car driver named Brent Magna, played by Ethan Hawke, is given a supped-up Mustang to pull off risky "stunts" so that his kidnapped wife isn’t killed by a mysterious man, giving orders from the dashboard speaker. Brent ends up unintentionally picking up a teenage punk, billed as The Kid, and Selena Gomez spouts more dialogue than a commentator at the Indy 500. Within this moon-faced starlet is all the technical exposition needed for Brent to reluctantly trust his uncompromising remora. And please don’t let the title fool you…

Just one word shy of the Sam Peckinpah/Steve McQueen 1970's classic, this is neither an old-school road frolic or even a FAST AND FURIOUS style shredder. Most of the uncreative “cockpit” angles are from built-in cameras so that Jon Voight’s mysterious villain, The Voice, can keep steadier watch than a GPS navigational system, while each and every exterior shot occurs in a loud, shaky flash. But all the rapidly-edited racing around town sure beats the conversations between our reluctant duo: Hawke and Gomez have less chemistry than a road cone and a burnt out flare... left on a dead end highway.