ETHAN HAWKE IN GETAWAY

Shut up and drive: demolition derby through Sofia, Bulgaria

To experience street racing at its purest we must reluctantly skip the amiable Fast & Furious series and revert to A Man and a Woman filmmaker Claude Lelouch's 8-minute, 38-second private solo race through Paris shot before dawn on a day in August 1976 on a camera attacked to a Mercedes 450 SEL 6.9, overdubbed for increased sexiness with the sound of a racing Ferrari 275. Lelouch called this little film "C'éait un rendez-vous" ("It was a date") and it's the Platonic ideal of the form.* This totally real, high speed and highly illegal non-stop ride zips through Paris from the Porte Dauphine at the Périférique, the Paris beltway, past many landmarks -- the Arc de Triomphe, Opéra Garnier, Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées -- running red lights, crossing divider lines, going the wrong way on one-way streets, running on the sidewalk to avoid a garbage truck. At the end a man gets out and hugs a blonde -- his "rendez-vous." Beautiful, and clean, perfect, and very French. Now forget all about that, if you can, and watch Getaway. You can come back to "C'était un rendez-vous" again afterwards. Getaway is dirty, messy, chaotic, crazy and over-the-top. Paris is nowhere in sight. It's a wild, destructive drive through Sofia, Bulgaria at the beck and call of a sadistic extortionist. But deep inside Getaway's DNA somewhere, there is "C'était un rendez-vous" waiting to be let out.

Getaway, like "Rendez-vous," is a racing movie with everything but the ride taken out. Sure, there's a plot, even an elaborate one. But as you watch the movie, you never get out of the car -- a souped-up Shelby Super Snake. That's the main character. There are four humans, but they never assume the dimensions of Dominic, Brian, Hobbs, Letty, et al. in Fast & Furious 6. Herein lies the classic beauty of Getaway -- and its absurd limitations. It's closest to "Rendez-vous" and closer to Two Lane Blacktop than to Fast & Furious or any car movie whose characters get out of the cars and have lives.

There's the driver, played by a scrawny, harried-looking Ethan Hawke, and there's his unwilling rider, played by Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber's off-and-on girlfriend, a pouty, spoiled banking heiress here who, you may be surprised to learn, becomes the brains of this expedition, an electronics-savvy techie who can rig the cameras and software the car is full of and figure out how to outsmart the Voice's plan to make them rob an investment bank rich in illegal funds, which Selena's dad happens to be the CEO of. Occasionally glimpsed in videos or black and white flashback snapshots is Hawke's wife Leanne (Rebecca Budig), who's been kidnapped by the Voice. And there's the Voice (actually -- spoiler alert -- Jon Voight, doing a creditable Eastern European accent).

Hawke is a racing car driver named Brent Magna, reputedly a very wild and unsafe one, though he recently won a race. The Voice comes on the in-car phone telling Hawke crazy things he has to do, or his wife will die. These include driving through a park and smashing all the Christmas decorations, constantly outrunning cops, running through barriers, endangering who knows how many bystanders. The Voice's nefarious motives come out only gradually, including stealing a USB drive. We're told that the Shelby Super Snake, which originally was custom made for the girl, but has electronics and a zillion cameras added to it, is "armored." Wow, is it ever. All through this movie it smashes into things, but it never stops, or gets seriously damaged. Whenever it smashes into a vehicle we see a police car fly up into the air, and the Super Snake zooms forward.

This is a stunt driving and stunt car photography tour-de-force. Of course Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez's only tour-de-force is pretending to be driving and riding through all this mayhem. And of course many consider this a terrible movie. But when the paint has been redone and the road dividers put back, it's a kind of classic. It has a zen obsessiveness about it that, while lacking the serene beauty of "C'était un rendez-vous," still makes it a nutty kind of pure cinema.

Getaway, 90 mins., opened wide in the US 30 August 2013; UK release date, 4 October.

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*There are various homages or making-of's, but the original Lelouch "C'était un rendez-vous" has been removed from YouTube. However at present you can watch it on a page promoting the upcoming Ron Howard race car film Rush about the James Hunt-Nikki Lauda rivelry in 1976, the same year as Lelouch's exploit.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.