GETAWAY
US, 2013, 90 minutes, Colour.
Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, John Voight, Rebecca Budig, Paul Freeman, Bruce Payne.
Directed by Courtney Solomon.
There must be easier ways of robbing a bank!
This is a hyper-adrenaline-charged film, lots of action, lots and lots and lots of high-speed driving through the city of Sofia (with the main characters American). The plot seems basically absurd for most of the film though there is some explanation for motivations at the end.
Ethan Hawke portrays a former racing car driver who has fallen on bad times, needing money and taking on odd jobs. At the opening, we see his wife attacked and abducted. He then is commanded by a mysterious voice (audiences seeing only his glasses nose and mouth whenever he appears) to take a car which has been set up with various cameras connected to the mysterious man’s computers.
For the first 30 minutes or so, the driver is commanded to speed through the city, the voice giving him the various turns, which brings him into conflict with many police cars (all of them demolished) and risky driving through crowded city streets, through a market, and commanded to crash into stalls. We don’t actually see whether anyone is killed or not.
Then the driver is held up at gunpoint by a young girl, Selena Gomez, whose car he has stolen. It has been a gift for her graduation by her banker father. She is cantankerous, she is afraid, she abuses the driver, threatening to get out – but the mysterious voice begins to control her as well.
The driver is desperate to obey the voice so that his wife will not be killed, his glimpsing her at various times during the drive.
Neither the driver, the girl nor the audience have any idea why the voice is commanding the driver to act in this way.
Eventually, it is made clear that he is being set up to rob a bank, the bank of the girl’s father. With so many police in pursuit, it also becomes clear to the driver that they are being set up and other people are robbing the bank at the same time. Which means then that he drives to the bank, now always helped by the girl who is something of a computer whiz. She knows where the power plant for the city is located, goes there only to find that again, she is being set up, and the whole plant explodes.
This time, the girl sets up fake images for the voice to look at and the couple hurry to the bank, driving in regardless of obstacles, actually taking the material the setup which the voice wants to steal, a memory stick filled with information for unaccounted for finances.
This means a set-up for the exchange of the stick for the wife, which duly happens, except that the driver notices and earpiece in the ear of the man he is handing over the material to. Which means that there is the mysterious voice who has not yet been seen. Because the girl has set up the images and fed them to the police, the police raced into the site and the man and his wife are reunited. But the girl is taken, and the driver goes in pursuit and saves her.
We finally see the face of the voice – it is John Voight. And his motivation is that the mysterious man has always admired the driver as a racer but thought that he had not achieved his potential and therefore has set up this particular scenario of fast and seemingly reckless driving to make him have faith in himself!
One might suggest that this is a film mainly for petrolheads!
