Ethan Hawke's forays into genre have been all about horror lately (The Purge, Sinister, Daybreakers). His uncredited turn in the Total Remake aside, we haven't seen him do action for a long while, which it's why it's a pleasure to see him as an ace driver behind the wheel of a stolen Shelby Cobra in this new trailer for the ludicrous-looking Getaway. Selena Gomez is along for the ride, and Jon Voight is giving the instructions.
As the clip makes abundantly clear, **Getaway **sees Hawke forced into a game of Simon Says with Voight's mysterious criminal prank caller. This seems like an overly complicated way for Voight to see his nefarious plans brought to fruition, but hey, it's high-concept action movie logic, so anything goes.
The genre has obviously given us mismatched central character pairings many times before (Murphy/Nolte, Gibson/Glover, Stallone/Russell, most recently Washington/Wahlberg) but we're saying that Hawke/Gomez is a particularly unlikely one.
This is not a remake or a sequel or a comicbook movie, but Getaway clearly does have its heart in a particular place, deliberately throwing back to previous glories. Its title alone is nicked from a collaboration between Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen, and its refusal to name most of its characters - The Kid, The Voice, The Man - evokes Walter Hill's The Driver. Hawke's character, however, gets the none-more-action moniker "Brent Magna".
That's "Brent Magna".
There's also, of course, a lot of Speed in the set-up, but it looks like a lot of fun, provided some of the action has been left out of the trailer and saved for the actual movie. Straight-to-DVD action king Moshe Diamante is among the producers, and director Courtney Solomon has a very similar background, with exec-producing credits on the likes of El Gringo and Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning. His two previous directing credits are Dungeons & Dragons and An American Haunting. Make of that what you will. Getaway is out in the UK on October 4.