FILM REVIEW OF ''A THOUSAND ACRES" (1997)

The tormented women in the epic tearjerker “A Thousand Acres” (**** OUT OF ****) hope that change will brighten their lives.  Instead, change ushers in nothing but tragedy.  The current popular designation for movies such as this glossy Michelle Pfeiffer & Jessica Lange melodrama is chick flicks.  Covering all the dirt in the life of a well-to-do Iowa farming clan, “A Thousand Acres” unravels as a soap opera about anguish, incest, insanity, adultery, and cancer, clearly qualifying this Touchstone Pictures release as a three-handkerchief extravaganza.   Moviegoers not familiar with Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel may prove less demanding than their more exacting literary counterparts.  Unsavory as most of “Acres” is, “Proof” director Jocelyn Moorhouse and “Portrait of a Lady” scenarist Laura Jones have exercised considerable artistic restraint and good taste in their depiction of the events.

Set in Iowa in 1979, “A Thousand Acres” introduces us to Larry Cook (Jason Robards), the Cook clan patriarch.  He owns a thousand acres of free and clear land.  Larry loves to tell the story about how his ancestors put in a drainage system and converted swamp land into profitable farm acreage.  Larry stands tall in the eyes of the community and has a say in all major decisions.  The Larry Cook character resembles Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” which essentially was the idea behind Smiley’s novel.  Larry’s wife died from cancer, but he has three daughters: Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer), Ginny (Jessica Lange), and the youngest Carolina (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Rose and Ginny both are married, Rose to Pete Lewis (Kevin Anderson) and Ginny to Ty (Keith Carradine). The older sisters have stayed at home, living in houses on either side of their father’s house.  Rose is raising two girls, but cancer has forced her to have a mastectomy.  The only nudity in this movie is the scene in the examination room when we are shown Pfeiffer face grafted onto someone else’s body.

Carolina differs from her elder sisters.  While they dress casually and are homemakers, Carolina is an attorney who wear her hair pulled back severely into a bun.  She isn’t married at the start of the movie, and her respect for Larry cannot match that of her sisters.  So when Larry, in an act of overwhelming generosity, decides to form a corporation and give equal shares to everybody, Carolina balks at the offer.  Furious, Larry all but disowns her, and nothing that the sisters can do will change Carolina’s mind.  Larry makes his relatives a gift of the farm because he feels that the inheritance tax would eat them alive.  Initially, “A Thousand Acres” gets off to a happy start.  Before fade-out, however, Moorhouse and Jones sling every bit of dirt that they can muster.

We learn that Larry has feel of clay and that Rose and Ginny differ in their temperament.  While Rose is consumed by her own sense of rage, Ginny insulates herself from the shadowy past.  The movie’s time frame encompasses a pivotal but devastating turning point in the Cook clan.  The two elder Cook sisters square off against Carolina.  Carolina accuses them of duping Larry out of his farm.  The people in town are convinced that both Rose and Ginny cheated their father, too.  Since Larry signed over the farm, he has either confined himself to his mansion like a shut-in or he drives around recklessly and gets drunk.  Whatever generosity that he had expressed at the beginning, Larry converts now into hate, fear, and rage toward his two daughters.  In an after-dark tornado sequence, Larry raves insanely and calls his daughters harlots.  Eventually, the ugly truth leaks out, and the Cook clan collapses like a house of cards.

As Ginny, Lange wears a glazed-eyed look and weaves a pattern of anxiety with her expressive hands.  Ginny has spent her entire life repressing the truth, and her nervous gestures and posture capture this evasion.  Lange’s performance is very mannered, and the matronly wardrobe that her frumpy character wears dilutes Lange’s sensuous Hollywood persona.  She has landed the choice role in “Acres.”  Ginny is the only character that expands and changes.  Lange is such a seasoned performer that she makes all of this fidgeting seem completely natural.  As Rose, Pfeiffer gets to fulminate and fire off at those people that she hates.  Pfeiffer has clearly gotten the flashy role, and she wrings every morsel of thespian disgust out of it.  Rose’s revulsion for her father is almost as destructive as the cancer she fears will engulf her, and she is not more charitable to her scummy, insensitive husband.  Pfeiffer’s character could easily qualify as the film’s villain, though that role belong to Jason Robards’ guilty patriarch.

Ideally cast as the father, Robards plays a parent whose paternal instincts have grown pretty base.  Indeed, the script makes little mention of Larry’s crisis, but Robards lets it erupt in a hypnotic performance that is all the more evocative considering his brief appearance on the screen.  His scene on the witness stand in court reveals how a talented actor can present character without having to spell it out.  This style of grim acting comes easily to Robards who legendary reputation in the American theatre derives from his tortured Eugene O’Neil characters.  Robards actually resembles one of “Jurassic Park’s” predatory T-Rex dinosaurs with his sunken eyes, sullen expressions, and occupational sneer.  The performances alone are worth the price of admission.  Nobody is miscast.  Keith Carradine’s famer husband is probably the only straightforward character who emerges from these disasters with his honesty intact.  Pfeiffer and Lange endow their performances with a sisterly blend.  Nevertheless, as sisters, they remain inevitably different.  By the time the movie concludes, these sisters have confessed what they could never have yielded in less strenuous circumstances.

Director Jocelyn Moorhouse, whose credits include “How to Make an American Quilt,” has crafted an elegiac saga of a family in disintegration.  Definitely not a feel-good movie, “A Thousand Acres’ is rather an emotional lobotomy that will leave you feeling sad but relieved.  Although Moorhouse and Jones have pared down Smiley’s book, they deliver a vibrant film that bristles with deep-seated domestic hostility.

FILM REVIEW OF ''SOLO" (1996)

Actor Mario Van Peebles plays a cyborg with a conscience in “Blue Tiger” director Norberto Barba’s“Solo” (**1/2 OUT OF ****), new science fiction thriller.  This ballistically paced testosterone thriller recycles familiar plot elements from movies such as “Universal Soldier” (1992), “Rambo: First Blood, Part II,” and the western classic “The Magnificent Seven.”  Although “Solo” appears initially as little more than a derivative African-American android opus, Barba has cleverly woven some traditional philosophical ideas about appropriate human behavior into the strands of their violent melodrama that goes beyond its cinematic pyrotechnics.

“Solo” opens aboard a U.S. spy trawler off the coast of an unidentified Latin American country.  Army General Clyde Haynes (Barry Corbin of “My Science Project”) introduces Solo, a $2-billion bionic soldier prototype designed as the ideal military killing machine.  According to Haynes, Solo has no feelings and is ultimately disposable.  Furthermore, Solo comes equipped with bullet proof skin, infrared vision, and the amazing ability to intercept radio messages during transmission.  Despite his formidable arsenal, Solo has been programmed with conflicting commands by its designer, Dr. Bill Stewart (Adrien Brody of “Splice”) has failed to tweak before the cyborg is sent into battle.

Colonel Madden (William Sadler of “Die Hard 2: Dead Harder”), a battle-seasoned adrenalin junkie, heads up a commando team dispatched to destroy an airfield that rebel guerrillas are constructing.  The Americans slip in under the cover of darkness, and Solo plants the explosives to blow up the airfield.  While he is setting up the explosives, Solo scans the area with his infrared vision and spots several noncombatants being used as slave labor.  Because these civilians may die from the blast, Solo’s command directives prevent him from following orders.  When the android decides to defuse the explosives, Madden triggers the remaining charges.  Explosions and machine-gun fire erupt, and the Americans scramble for their helicopters, deliberately abandoning their robotic warrior.  Solo receives a messianic wound low on his left side that fires his power management chip.  But that doesn’t keep our super-soldier protagonist from grabbing onto one of the choppers as it lifts off.

Back aboard the trawler, Stewart removes the damaged chip.  He explains to Solo that the android must switch over to back-up power until the chip can be replaced.  This make the super-soldier just a little less invincible.  Meanwhile, a furious Haynes and a vindictive Madden demand to know why Solo refused to obey orders.  Stewart explains that a glitch occurred when Solo tried to resolve a discrepancy in his command menu.  Madden wants to shut Solo down, but Haynes decides to salvage their expensive prototype.  Solo intercepts the outgoing transmission and learns that Haynes wants him reprogrammed.  Solo consults his menu of functions and learn that his prime directive is self-preservation.  Before “Solo” fades to black, our android hero learns that to act selfishly may be logical but is not appropriate human behavior.  Solo steals a helicopter and flies off to the mainland.  Madden chases him and watches as Solo crashes into a mountain.  When Madden sifts through the wreckage, he cannot find a trace of the wily cyborg. Solo managed to survive the crash and has vanished into the bowels of the jungle. 

A small boy from the village discovers Solo resting in an underground temple and nearly gets bitten when a snake attacks him.  Solo goes on line on the spur of the moments and grabs the snake before its venomous fangs sink into the vulnerable child.  Horrified, the lad runs back to his village, but later returns with his father and the rest of the village.  When they find the considerably run-down Solo, they believe at first that he is dead.  The little boy demands they give him a proper burial.  At the church, he bad guy rebels storm in, interrupting the burial ritual, and shoot up the church.  Solo springs into action and single-handedly wipes them out.  The villagers reveal that the rebels were forcing them under threat of death to clear an airstrip.  Solo agrees to teach the farmers how to fight if they will allow him to use parts from an old black and white, portable television to recharge himself.  At this point, Peebles emerges as “The Magnificent Seven” stacked into one.  They arrange elaborate traps around the village, and Solo shows them how to use bows and arrows to lethal effect.  When the rebels return, the villagers give them a reception that throws them off-balance.  

Back aboard the trawler, surveillance devices warn them about a battle raging in the jungle.  Haynes orders Colonel Madden to lead in an elite unit of hand-picked mercenaries to recover Solo.  Madden secretly wants to destroy the prototype.  If Solo performs well under fire, Madden fears that similar prototypes may eventually replace career soldiers like him.  He believes that his men can kill Solo because the android is not only vulnerable but heavily damaged.  Once he reaches the mainland, Madden cuts a deal with the slimy rebels to ice Solo.  First, Madden fakes evidence so it appears that Solo has gone crazy and torched the village.  The Colonel broadcasts deceptive images of a burning hut back to Haynes aboard the trawler and he swallows the lie.  As bait to lure Solo out, Madden persuades Haynes to send in Stewart, who learns too late that Madden duped him.  Solo manages to rescue his creator in a way that would make Indiana Jones envious.  But Stewart is fatally wounded during the escape.  “I should never have left college,” Stewart laments and hands Solo a rebuilt power chip before he dies.  To divulge any other details about the story would undercut the entertainment value of the movie.

“Solo” breaks no new ground for this specific type of character or adventure film, but Narba stages the action well.  Most audiences have seen everything that Solo eventually learns, especially if they’ve kept track of Mr. Spock’s progress over the years in the original “Star Trek” movies.  If you enjoy fast-moving, well-crafted actioneers, “Solo” is worth watching once.

FILM REVIEW OF ''RIDDICK" (2013)

You’ve got to like Vin Diesel to enjoy his movies.  Diesel plays the same character or a variation on it in all his movies. He has a narrow range of roles. Generally, he makes crime thrillers. He skewered his image with “The Pacifier” back in 2005.  Diesel dominates his films, but his co-stars occasionally make an impression.  Indeed, the gravel-voiced Diesel stands out in any crowd.  A brawny hulk of a fellow, Diesel maintains a Frank Frazetta physique, sports a Telly Savalas haircut, and pierces you with his gimlet eyes.  Diesel lacks neither nerve nor authority.  Apparently, he splits his time between the “Fast & Famous” franchise and the “Riddick” franchise.  Word is that Diesel has negotiated to appear in a second “xXx” sequel entitled “xXx: The Return of Xander Cage.”  The “Riddick” franchise has not been as financially rewarding for Universal Pictures as the “Fast & Furious” series, but the actor has a soft spot for Riddick. 

In the first Riddick epic “Pitch Black,” our anti-heroic, convict with man-made night vision fought carnivorous, pelican-like dinosaur birds with huge raptor teeth.  Obsessed by its insatiable lust for blood, these flying piranha teeth fowl descended onto Riddick and company like waves of Stuka-bats.  “Pitch Black” concerned survival under the worst conditions against a deadly supernatural predator.  The stranger in a strange land applied almost equally to this creepy sci-fi fantasy because the crash victims were tourists on a planet teeming with “Jurassic Park” predators.  Basically, “Pitch Black” (2000) resembled an old-fashioned Tarzan movie whose setting had been altered to outer space.  Instead of a private plane crashing in a jungle filled with deadly tribes and predators, a commercial cargo vessel plunges to a planet ruled by deadly carnivores.  In a Tarzan movie, the heroes would battle their way to safety after encounters with lions, baboons, elephants, and crocodiles.  Director David Twohy’s original generated considerable suspense with shocks and surprises to compensate for its standard-issue plot.  You knew Vin would triumph.  This same problem plagued the ambitious “Chronicles of Riddick” (2004) that put our protagonist into a completely different plot.  He tangled with human rather than bestial adversaries.  “Chronicles” appeared five years after “Pitch Black.”  Comparatively, “Chronicle” shunned the exotic wildlife and survival-of-the-fittest themes.  Instead, it introduced a race of amoral space marauders named the ‘Necromongers.’  The second Riddick movie looked like “Flash Gordon” meets “Dune” space opera.  As the second sequel in the “Pitch Black” franchise, director David Twohy’s “Riddick” (***1/2 OUT OF ****) shuns the spectacle of “Chronicles” and reverts to survival of the fittest, with exotic, celestial predators.  The “Riddick” predators surpass the “Pitch Black” beasties, and Riddick performs several impressive feats.  Furthermore, “Riddick” ties its two previous movies together in its plot.  Karl Urban appears in a cameo early in the action as Vaako.

If you haven’t seen “The Chronicles of Riddick,” you may find yourself at a considerable disadvantage.  “Riddick” opens on a hostile planet where our protagonist has been left to perish.  Richard P. Riddick (Vin Diesel of “xXx”) is in pretty bad shape.  The opening scene with a repulsive space vulture that Riddick traps in his fist epitomizes his dire predicament.  The double-crossing Necromongers have abandoned Riddick on the wrong planet and triggered an avalanche where he breaks his leg.  Jamming his foot in a crack in the rocks, he straightens out of his injured appendage.  “Riddick” shows how Riddick is as resourceful as Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo” protagonist.  The funniest incident occurs when Riddick fakes off a snarling alien jackal.  Designated “Dingo Doggies” by other characters, these beasts are huge, Great Dane hounds with black stripes crossing their dark orange fur.  Eventually, Riddick finds a puppy and trains it.  Our rugged hero discovers that he is on a part of the planet that he cannot leave without sloshing through a small mud pond.  Remember the fairy tale about the troll who lived under a bridge?  Lurking in this harmless puddle is a poisonous “Mud Demon” creature.   These predators perambulate on two legs, possess a long, scorpion-like tail with snapping pincers, and prefer to wallow in mud.  Riddick studies a Mud Demon” and observes how it submerges part of its body.  This fiend distracts you with its cobra-like, scorpion tail while the rest of its body—concealed by the mud—moves in for the kill with a head shaped like the “Alien” monster to seize its prey.  Once Riddick has contrived his strategy, he slays the creature and finds his way to an outpost established by space mercenaries for emergencies.  Space mercenaries are typically bounty hunters.  Riddick activates a signal beacon like the little girl warrior did in “Hanna.”  Promptly, two teams of bounty hunters respond.  The reward on Riddick’s head is doubled if the bounty hunters kill him.  Santana (Jordi Mollà of “Blow”) and his well-armed but unsavory crew arrive first, while Johns (Matt Nable of “Killer Elite”) and his team follow.  Johns promises Santana that he will let him operate with a free hand.   Indeed, Johns is related to the Johns that had captured Riddick in “Pitch Black.”

"Pitch Black" rarely gave us crystal clear views of its predators.  “Riddick” provides us with a front-row seat to appreciate the Mud Demons in all their menace.  “The Chronicles of Riddick” contained only one scene with caged animals.  Our hero is back in his element in “Riddick,” and he has his hands filled throughout the film’s veritable two hour running time.  Mind you, “Riddick” never wears out its welcome.  Specifically, Riddick unfolds in three acts.  Initially, Riddick adapts and recuperates on the planet after the evil Necromongers have abandoned him.  He studies his number one enemy, and this predator returns in greater numbers later when a massive storm provides it with conditions ideal to its migration.  Riddick amounts to a space Rambo.  He moves on phantom feet, and you rarely know where he is since he is so clandestine.  Riddick and Santana are at each other’s throats throughout “Riddick,” and Santana qualifies as a thoroughly obnoxious villain.  He murders a defenseless woman after he releases her and later cites his growing attachment to her as his justification.  Santana vows to collect Riddick’s head in a box.  The pay-off to this intense rivalry resembles something from a 1980s’ Arnold Schwarzenegger actioneer.  For sheer diversity, Johns’ team features a battle-hardened lesbian, Dahl (Katee Sackhoff who played ‘Starbuck’ in “Battlestar Galactica”), with an affinity for firearms.  David Twohy, who has helmed all three Riddick epics, slips in surprises galore. Altogether, “Riddick” tops “Pitch Black,” but it is neither as spectacular nor as multi-layered as “Chronicles.”  If “Riddick” marks your first exposure to the “Pitch Black” franchise, you are probably going to be lost when references to the previous installments occur.  Meanwhile, Riddick fans will appreciate Twohy’s efforts to impose continuity onto the trilogy. Here’s hoping we won’t have to wait another decade for another “Riddick” sequel.

FILM REVIEW OF ''LAST MAN STANDING" (1996)

International filmmakers have exerted great influence on American movies.  When Hollywood runs out of fresh ideas, the major studios often turn to foreign films for inspiration.  Sometimes, a moviemaker appears who can adapt a foreign film in such a revolutionary way that audiences sits up and pay attention.  Writer & director Walter Hill manages this ambitious feat in his cinematic version of the 1961 Japanese samurai epic “Yojimbo” by the brilliant director Akira Kurosawa.  Incidentally, “Yojimbo” translated means “bodyguard.” In the 1950s and 1960s, Kurosawa emerges as one of the few Asian filmmakers who commanded the respect of American audiences.  His film grew popular in the West.  Moreover, Kurosawa translated profitably in western s.  His films have served as the basis for John Sturges’ 1960 classic “The Magnificent Seven,” Sergio Leone’s landmark Spaghetti western “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), and now Walter Hill’s “Last Man Standing.”  Hill recycles the venerable Kurosawa tale as a Prohibition Era gangster saga, casting Bruce Willis as a tight-lipped soldier of fortune with two guns and an attitude.  The story contains all the subtlety of a hail of lead, and “Last Man Standing” erupts with the fury of an artillery barrage.

The remote setting of Jericho, Texas, exists in a moral vacuum.  The gangsters have scared away all the good people and paid for the law as they have bought most of the women.  Women decorate the periphery of “Last Man Standing’ in minor roles as hostages, whores, and mistresses. These unhappy females are trapped in Jericho as male playthings and the consequences of defiance carry a high price as one girl learns.  When John Smith (Bruce Willis of “Die Hard”) wheels his Ford into the dusty, rundown town of Jericho, he is searching for a quiet place to lay low before he vanishes into Mexico.  What he encounters are two greedy Chicago bootlegging clans competing for supremacy over the illegal whiskey trade. Like Clint Eastwood in “A Fistful of Dollars,” Smith smells money galore in “Last Man Standing” so he hires out his guns to the highest bidders.

Smith plays the Italians and the Irish skillfully against each other in a suspenseful game of cat and mouse.  When he helps a young woman held hostage by the Irish, Smith finally pays for his interference.  The Irish gang, headed by Doyle (Daniel Patrick Kelly), captures and stomps our protagonist until he resembles a bruised tomato. Somehow, Smith endures this horrible beating and gets away.  Furiously, Doyle massacres the Italian leader, Strozzi (Ned Eisenberg), and his gang at a roadhouse where the Irish believe Smith has filed for protection.  Instead, Smith holes up out of town in a church to recover his strength.  Jericho’s corrupt sheriff (Bruce Dern of “The Cowboys”), decides to help Smith out by loaning him two guns. Smith takes the hardware and challenges the Irish to a Wild West showdown.  

As his own scenarist, director Walter Hill has kept most of the original story intact.  If you’re looking for comparisons, you might find it easier to correlate “Last Man Standing” with “A Fistful of Dollars” rather than “Yojimbo.”  As the writer, Hill fumbles in making the evil, Tommy-gun toting Hickey (Christopher Walken of “The Anderson Tapes”) a henchman rather than the boss, as the corresponding character was in “A Fistful of Dollars.”  He is the only match bullet-for-bullet with Smith. As Hickey, Christopher Walken adds another despicable villain to his cinematic gallery of rogues, playing second fiddle to Doyle.  Hill generates minor suspense when lesser characters refer to Hickey’s character and the hellishness that always follows in his wake.

“Last Man Standing” is a raw, hard-bitten, little, B-move shoot’em-up with A-class pretentions that pays homage to not only Kurosawa but also stylishly imitates the excessive violence from recent Hong Kong crime thrillers.  If you want to compare it to one of Bruce’s American thrillers, the Tony Scott directed bullet ballet “The Last Boy Scout” (1991) is the best example.  Hill the writer doesn’t waste time contriving an elaborate plot that hinges on small but crucial details.  When characters are not performing tasks on-screen, they are deployed off-screen in plot related activities.  This is one who where what the characters do off-screen is of integral importance to what others do on-screen.

cCompared with Clint Eastwood who played the Man with No Name in “A Fistful of Dollars,” Bruce Willis here is the Man With Anybody’s Name.  As he reveals to the Italians, he is simply John Smith from back East.  John Smith is a taciturn fellow.  He doesn’t make a big deal out of most things unless he finds his expertise challenged.  If you’re a Willis fan, “Last Man Standing” isn’t Bruce as usual.  He is neither “Die Hard” Detective John McClane nor is he David Addison from “Moonlighting.”  He is a man of few words and fewer wisecracks.  Smith is an unrepentant hardcase who admits as much without remorse during his opening narration.  Here Willis delineates the character of Smith more out of what is left unsaid.

The film amounts to a genre mash-up: a period crime drama crossed with a western.  In it, the Old West is a dying dream.  The New West, suggests Hill, is being taken over by business suits from back East with hardware.  Nevertheless, that Wild West justice might be out of sight but it’s not entirely out of mind.  Altogether, “Last Man Standing” qualifies as a loud, bloody shoot’em-up that shouldn’t disappoint action fans.

FILM REVIEW OF ''GETAWAY" (2013)

Everybody gets taken for a ride in “Dungeons & Dragons” director Courtney Solomon’s “Getaway” (** OUT OF ****), co-starring Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, and Jon Voight.  Spectacularly staged car chases and slam-bang stunts cannot compensate for the scarcity of suspense and dearth of characterization in this low-octane vehicular evasion thriller.  Undoubtedly, whether they would admit it or not, Solomon and freshman scribes Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker drew inspiration for their cinematic demolition derby from cult 1970s era automotive epics such as “Vanishing Point” and “Gone in 60 Seconds” as well as the recent trilogy of “Transporter” films.  Other movies swirled into the soup for the derivative “Getaway” are abduction opuses like “The Chase,” “Taken 2” and “Ransom.”  The speeding cars in “Getaway” are more interesting than the shallow characters.  Oscar nominated lead Ethan Hawke spends most of his screen time ensconced behind the wheel of an armored, 2008, Ford Shelby GT500 Super Snake Mustang.  Eventually, Gomez joins Hawke, but these two conjure up nothing in the way of camaraderie.  Oscar winner Jon Voight appears primarily in dermatological close-ups of his mouth and eyes as an anonymous villain reminiscent of James Bond’s arch nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Voight spends virtually all his time on the phone droning on interminably with an ersatz Teutonic accent.  Occasionally, actors are ridiculed for giving performances with all the spontaneity of a telephone conversation, but this is precisely what Voight does.  He gives our hero his marching orders.  None of these characters, however, possess a shred of sympathy.  The cast does little to enliven them with either traits or memorable lines of dialogue.  Meantime, Ryan Dufrene’s Cuisinart editing; the CGI-free car and motorcycle crashes, and an amoral ending which provides an excuse for a sequel make the implausible “Getaway” palatable.  Although it coined less than five million dollars at the box office during its opening weekend, “Getaway” could still break even.  Warner Brothers produced it for $18 million.  The southeastern European city of Sofia, Bulgaria, served as the setting, and the film producers got more bang for their budget because production costs are far less expensive. 

Essentially, “Getaway” amounts to little more than a tire-screeching Shelby Mustang advertisement.  Our protagonist, Brent Magna (a mustached Ethan Hawke of “Training Day”), is a former professional NASCAR driver who burned out on the circuit.  A gang of mysterious villains abduct Brent’s wife, Leanne (Rebecca Budig of “Batman Forever”), at Christmas and compel him to hijack a customized Mustang and then drive it wherever they say.  No, Brent doesn’t know these thugs, but he knows Leanne’s life hangs in the balance.  The entire film occurs at between dusk and dawn. At one point, the Voice (Jon Voight of “Heat”) orders Brent to careen through a crowded public skating rink.  Although our hero inflicts considerable damage to the premises, he doesn’t kill anybody like the homicidal Venice Beach maniac did not long ago.  Once he has trashed the area and stampeded the pedestrians, Brent receives orders to haul ass elsewhere.  Repeatedly, the Voice warns Brent if he doesn’t comply with his instructions that Leanne will die.  Along the way, our beleaguered protagonist encounters the Mustang’s owner, cherub-faced Selena Gomez, and this improbable pair collaborate to save Brent’s kidnapped wife.  The Gomez character doesn’t have name.  Officially, she is referred to during the end credits simply as ‘the Kid.’  She abhors the array of wireless, digital cameras that the villains have attached to her automobile, and her relationship with Brent gets off on the wrong foot.  The moment she jumps into the Shelby, the Kid brandishes a gun and tries to oust Brent from the vehicle.  The Voice knows everything that Brent and the Kid are doing because those cameras as well as a GPS keep tabs on them.  When our heroes aren’t trying to outwit the Voice, they have their hands full evading the local authorities.  Of course, Brent doesn’t have much trouble eluding those small Bulgarian police cars, but he faces greater challenges when the Voice dispatches cars and motorcycles driven by henchmen armed with bazookas and sub-machine guns.  The Voice plans to rob an investment bank where money is stashed in the form of computer files. 

Everything in “Getaway” has been meticulously scripted.  Brent serves as the hare who draws the hounds away from the Voice’s actual objective.  Later, we learn the Voice has admired Brent from afar and is giving the ex-NASCAR driver a chance to prove that he is still a top-notch driver.  Brent as well as the army of stunt car drivers displays some fearless, gear-grinding maneuvers.  The Kid isn’t just as kid.  She is a computer whiz with a tote bag of electronics gadgets, including a tablet.  She relies on her technical skills to thwart the constant surveillance that the cameras provide the Voice so he will always know their whereabouts.  As it turns out, the Kid’s father runs the bank where the millions that the Voice wants are stored.  “Getaway” is like a modular narrative.  Everything serves a purpose, but none of it is remotely credible.  Indeed, the filmmakers shun subtlety in favor of speed.  Ironically, despite all the mayhem both real and imagined, this 90-minute, PG-13-rated nonsense doesn’t have enough tread to be gripping.  Occasionally, something cool happens.  The henchmen at an intersection with a bazooka aimed at Brent get the surprise of the lives just as we do when the Voice pulls off his own amazing stunt. 

The cars and the stunt drivers qualify as the real stars of “Getaway.”  Presumably, Solomon and his 21 producers sought to make the stunts as genuine as possible because the script is a superficial, damsel-in-distress, crime thriller with one-dimensional characters.  The filmmakers smashed up 130 cars, and seven Shelby Mustangs were built specifically for the film.  Unfortunately, despite all the fascinating, behind-the-scenes, automotive trivia, “Getaway” runs out of gas long before its happy ending.  Stay away from “Getaway!”