This Is Ethan Hawke's Worst Movie, According To Rotten Tomatoes

Most of the time, Ethan Hawke is an indicator of quality — or, if not that, then an ambition to make something meaningful. He's always taken the craft of acting seriously (something that spurred a good-natured war of attrition between him and Robin Williams while filming "Dead Poets Society"), but he's not haughty about it. He played a vampiric hematologist for The Spierig Brothers in 2009's "Daybreakers" and even joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe with his role as an Ammit-worshipping weirdo who pours glass shards in his shoes for "Moon Knight." Also, let's not forget that time he decked himself out in garish accessories to play the incredibly-named Jolly the Pimp in Luc Besson's eye-popping space opera "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" (a reminder that bad people can make spectacular art).

Alas, 2013's "Getaway" is the rare occasion where it's hard to imagine Hawke having signed on for reasons other than an easy paycheck. The schlocky thriller — no relation to writer Walter Hill and director Sam Peckinpah's 1972 bank robber actioner "The Getaway" — sits Hawke behind a steering wheel for virtually its entire runtime, with naught for company but poor Selena Gomez (who's stuck playing his defiant younger sidekick in a role so hackneyed that the movie doesn't even bother giving her character a name beyond "The Kid"). It's Hawke's lowest-ranked film on Rotten Tomatoes with a critics rating of just three percent against an average score of 2.8 out of 10 from 145 reviews. Its user rating is only slightly less awful at 36 percent.

In my own review of the film at the time (which is no longer available to read online), I apparently wrote, "The direction is so amateurish that 'Getaway' fails to even provide serviceable B-movie thrills." On that much, I agree with my decade-younger self.

"Getaway" is the third and, so far, final film directed by Courtney Solomon after 2000's ill-famed "Dungeons & Dragons" movie (which somehow got two direct-to-video follow-ups) and 2005's mostly-forgotten horror picture "An American Haunting." His run as a producer is only somewhat more reputable in that you've at least heard of stuff like "After" and "The Strangers: Chapter 1," while his sequels "Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning" and "The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations" are, shockingly, not considered the bottom of the barrel.

As for "Getaway," the script, which is credited to Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker, follows Hawke's washed-up race driver Brent Magna as he's blackmailed by a mysterious law-breaker (Jon Voight, doing his best version of a stereotypical '90s Eastern European action movie villain despite never properly showing his face onscreen) who has kidnapped his wife into carrying out a convoluted robbery that requires him to drive like hell. Also, "The Kid" is there. It's utter nonsense, but in the right hands, it could've made for an inoffensive potboiler.

Unfortunately, nearly all the action consists of footage captured by low-grade digital cameras attached to Magna's ride, a Shelby Mustang, and then spliced together with little to no sense of rhythm or reason. The only exception is the film's single-take climax, although by that point your head will be aching too much from the previous hour-plus of metal-crunching, sparks-flying chaos to even appreciate it. (For the record, the above screenshot is actually a pretty accurate rendering of what most of this movie looks like.)

Since it's no longer available, I'll end this article the same way I did my original review — by sharing an anecdote about how, when the credits started rolling at my "Getaway" screening, a young woman who had presumably been dragged there by her boyfriend quickly stood up and whisper-shouted in what was, admittedly, a mostly-empty theater, "That was SO stupid!" Can't argue with her there.