Getaway, starring Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez (Spring Breakers) is indicative of the kind of junk modern Hollywood is content to produce.
There is little as disappointing as the declining quality of modern cinema. Gone are the days of Citizen Kane, and now we must comply as Hollywood shoves cinematic turds such as National Treasure: Book of Secrets down our throats. It’s insulting and degrading. We as an audience deserve better.
I have no doubt the brunt of the blame falls on the movie industry itself. Greedy executives care about one thing and one thing only: money. And much like captured spies nervously tonguing the cyanide capsule hidden behind their molars, these executives just want to take the easy way out. Why spend extra effort writing a new and original script when you can just sell the same stories over and over again? Good guy versus bad guy. Rescuing a love interest. Happy ending. Add some explosions and tragic death scenes oversaturated with forced and unearned emotions. Repackage the same story, change the location and actors and start all over. The result is the slow but inevitable decline of cinema as an art form. As long as money takes priority over quality, what could be a beautiful and progressive form of storytelling will stay a stagnant cash cow.
Take, for example, the film Getaway, which I saw last weekend. It’s the story of a racecar driver, played by Ethan Hawke (The Purge), who is forced to perform a number of driving-related tasks to save his kidnapped wife. The premise is laughable and the execution even worse. The dialogue is wooden and exists only to move the plot forward, in the classic “tell, not show” style. What’s worse is the director thinks he can substitute mindless car chases for character development. These messy chase scenes consist of a mind-blowingly large number of cuts per second — perhaps to disorient the viewer, perhaps to try something avant-garde — and are impossible to follow. Why the movie industry thinks the public wants to see garbage like this is beyond me.
One thing is clear: Somebody has to do something. I’m not sure who, and I’m not sure what, but somebody has to save the movie industry. It’s too promising a medium to be reduced to such drivel. So, I’m begging you readers: If any of you knows anybody who may know what to do, please get him or her to save this industry for us. Write your congressman. Get your rich uncle to bribe a studio executive. Do something because the quality of movies we have been forced to see lately has been horrific.
And with that, I’m signing off, because I have to see The Expendables 3 with my friends. It’s going to be terrible, unoriginal and uninspired, but that’s what we’re forced to endure.
