Driving Movie Tropes and Getaway (2013)

There are few feelings in the world like hitting the open road in your car and driving the day away.  It’s relaxing to some, a release of pent up emotions to others, and just plain fun to even more people.  Driving can be many things to many people.  Everyone who has ever driven a car has some sort of emotion attached to driving.  Everyone that has been a passenger has some sort of emotion attached to being in a car.  Cars are relatable and driving cars fast is a dream that many people have.  That makes it easy for cars to be put on film.

In 2013, Courtney Solomon directed a movie that attempted to give viewers the adrenaline of fast driving and narrow escapes.  That movie was Getaway.  It starred Ethan Hawke as Brent Magna, a disgraced race car driver being tormented by an unnamed man (Jon Voight) to do bad things with his car.  Most of the movie is spent escaping police.  Along the way, Magna is joined by a kid (Selena Gomez), the owner of the car he stole.  Together, Magna and the Kid try to foil the plans of the voice and escape the clutches of the police who are trying to catch them.

Getaway is a movie that plays into many of the different tropes that you would see throughout driving movies.  Everything from the car to the way that it is driven to the dynamic of the leads within the car.  The movie is filled with these noticeable tropes that even the most casual viewer would be able to detect.  The many little things that are present in driving movies are present in Getaway, which makes it feel both tired, and semi-fun.  It’s an awkward riding of the fine line between okay and ridiculous, that crosses into ridiculous many times.

These tropes will be highlighted throughout this week’s post, using examples from other movies as well as many examples that are present throughout Getaway.  It will be a sort of point-counterpoint, in the same way that I have done it with different movies in different genres.  The one that comes to mind for me first is when I watched Metal Man and did the same sort of thing for superhero movies.  This time, I will be breaking down some of the tropes that can be found within the driving movies that we all know are out there.  So here we go.

The Car

Every driving movie needs a car that stands out.  It needs to be cool, have cool features, or be memorable in some way.  I guess that the same could be said about driving shows.  In order to drive, you need a vehicle.  In order to stand out, the vehicle needs to be interesting.   You want a vehicle that the audience would want to drive; a vehicle that they want to take out on the road so that they can act like the driver in the movie.  The audience needs to want to race around, doing awesome stunts in the car.  It needs to be a dream machine.

The car in Getaway is a customized Shelby Mustang.  It has been armor plated to provide better protection while driving.  It is fast, it sounds tough, and Brent Magna drives it around so well that you imagine yourself pulling off the same maneuvers.  They managed to get the cool down pat, and they made it so that you wanted to drive like him.  Yet, in the writing of the movie, there was one major flaw with the car.  It came with the demented voice that was controlling Magna’s every move.  The faceless menace had the car rigged so that he could see and hear everything Magna did.  Magna had to drive around based on his wants and desires.  And, most notably, he was not allowed out of the car.  These things make any wish to drive the car feel dulled because you don’t want to have to deal with that guy.

On the other hand, you have a movie like Smokey and the Bandit, which is all about the gleeful joy that the bandit has making the police look like fools.  The bandit drove a Pontiac Trans Am and made the car as cool as it could be.  It had no armor or anything, but it did have an eagle on the front that made it look even cooler while soaring down the highway, evading the police.  People so wanted to drive the car that they made the movie into the second highest box office grossing movie of 1977 behind Star Wars.  That’s how much of a sensation the movie was.  And a lot of that is due to the car.

Police Cars

No driving movie (racing movies aside) is complete without a police chase.  That seems like a necessity in a driving movie.  The high speeds and crazy driving would only lead to the police stepping in to try and stop it from happening more.  During these chases, many police cars crash.  There are car flips, cars driving into cars, and many pedestrian injuries that are ignored by the movie.  Police are integral to the makeup of a driving movie because the drivers tend to be breaking laws.

There are a whole lot of police present in Getaway.  Most of the movie is spent having the main character be chased by the police while trying to escape.  Most of the time, it’s not that entertaining.  The police are faceless and never seem like a real threat during the movie.  There is no point in which I think he’ll get caught.  The takedown of the police is never interesting to watch because it all seems rather simple in how they crash.  Even with the large amount of police going after Brent Magna, there is nothing fun about watching them crash.

A movie that makes the takedown of police exceptionally fun is Fast Five.  Throughout the movie, time is spent building up the corruption of the police force in Rio.  The final, climactic action scene involves the Fast and Furious team stealing a safe from the police station basement and driving through the city while being chased by the police forces.  There are police crashing into other cars, police being demolished by a safe, and police being taken out by the Fast team members pretending to be police.  It all culminates in the safe being thrown at some police people.  It is an exciting, high octane action sequence with good driving, enjoyable characters, and actual meaning to the police being taken out.

The Woman

The vast majority of driving movies are about men driving cars.  But, that’s like saying that the vast majority of any genre is about a male main character.  That’s the way Hollywood works.  Unless the movie is horror or romantic comedy, chances are that it is about a man.  There are exceptions, of course, but there are many more male centric movies than female centric movies.  Now, with driving movies, there tends to be a woman who drives shotgun, or is involved in the driving with the driver.

Selena Gomez is that woman in the movie Getaway.  She is the owner of the car, which had been stolen a few days previous.  She tracks down Magna and the car, and threatens his life.  This leads to her ending up in the car as a part of what is going on.  She and Hawke play well enough off of each other but their rapport is based more upon getting out of the situation than actual chemistry between the characters.  They aren’t attached to each other outside of the fact that they’re both trapped in the car.  There’s no romantic interest to it.  They aren’t related.  They are complete strangers just trying to get out of the situation.  Though their chemistry was okay, there needed to be more between them once they both realized their situation.

The Nicolas Cage remake of Gone in 60 Seconds didn’t have a woman in quite the same way as Getaway.  It still has a woman involved in the driving, though.  The car thieving team included Angelina Jolie, who was a love interest for Nicolas Cage’s character.  The two had enough chemistry and there was enough of a story for just those two characters that it made them fun to watch together.  It made the movie more than driving.  It added to the character and gave a little more depth to the situation that they were in.  It improved what could have just been a movie about people stealing cars.

Cool Driving

Of course a driving movie needs some cool driving in it.  There needs to be driving that you wouldn’t normally get in your daily life.  Speed, quick turns, tight places, jumps, and many other things that don’t happen during your commute to work.  Driving movies are about the daydreams of the audience.  The driving has to be what they wish they could do.  A driving movie without great driving is a driving movie not worth making.

The driving in Getaway isn’t bad.  It has everything that you could want from driving.  The problem is that it isn’t shot in an all that exciting way.  The quick cutting takes away from seeing a lot of the good stunts, especially toward the end when the quick cuts come back after a very interesting extended shot of driving down a long road, going through red lights, and avoiding other cars on the road.  Outside of that shot, you know what’s going on, but can’t fully see it.  To feel the adrenaline of the driving, you want to be able to see it and make out the action that is happening.  If you can’t make out the action, you never completely feel the turns and the dodges and stuff.  You just feel mayhem.

One of the greatest chase scenes in movie history is in the movie Bullitt.  You know exactly what is going on the entire time that the car chase is going on.  You follow the cars through each turn and you hear the engines rev.  The way that the movie is edited, you feel the adrenaline of being in that car chase.  The chase is filled with action and even ends with a car crash that feels significant.  Everything about it works.

Final Crash

The final crash isn’t a trope featured in every driving movie, but many of them have it.  What happens is that during the climactic chase of the movie, the driver ends up crashing the car.  It makes it look like the driver is in a deadly situation.  It also shows the wreckage of a good looking car (in most cases), which gets some sympathy from the audience who wanted to drive the car.  This moment can invest the audience even more into the final minutes of the film as they wonder what happened to the main character.

Brent Magna was a pretty great driver throughout Getaway, no matter what the kid said while she was sitting in the passenger seat.  He avoided all of the police cars throughout the movie using the driving talent he had from his racing days.  This culminated in a final chase that ended with Magna crashing the car while avoiding a person.  The car had a massive amount of external damage, which made things look dire.  Yet, it had been mentioned earlier in the film that it was an armored vehicle, so you were able to rightfully assume that Magna would be fine.  It took away from the impact of the crash, though the crash still looked cool.

The most famous crash in driving movie history would probably be in Vanishing Point, though to say any more would be spoiling the movie.  Let’s just say that you feel the impact of it long after the movie ends.  And the scene has been alluded to in many other movies, television shows, and even music videos.  If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean.  If you haven’t, see the movie.

Driving movies are some of the most adrenaline filled movies out there.  That’s why they’re such a hit in cinema recently with the Fast and Furious franchise.  As of writing this post, Furious 7 is the second most popular movie of the year behind Jurassic World.  People love to watch cars do insane and unrealistic things, and that is partially due to the fact that people wish they could do the same sort of car action.  There’s a degree of escapism that comes with the car movies that people like watching.  Seeing the action makes them forget their problems because the cars are so exciting.

Sometimes the tropes can help to improve these movies.  Other times, the tropes can take away from them.  Like with any kind of movie, it is all about the way in which the filmmakers make it.  If the direction, writing, or editing are bad, the movie will probably be bad.  If there are good people behind the movie, it will be good.  It takes a good movie to get people to lose themselves in it.  Getaway is not that movie.  But there are other driving movies out there that are immersive.  Good movies by good filmmakers who know what they are doing.

There are a few notes that I need to toss in here before we part ways for the week:

• Getaway was suggested for the Sunday “Bad” Movies by @shutupkaleena.
• I mentioned Metal Man in this post.  I also mentioned Star Wars.  I never covered Star Wars for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, but I did cover Starcrash, a knock-off of the science fiction classic.
• Jon Voight was in Getaway.  He was also in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Bratz: The Movie, and Anaconda. 
• Both Dimo Alexiev and Velislav Pavlov were performers in Getaway.  They were also in The Legend of Hercules.
• An actor named Paul Freeman was in Getaway.  He could previously be seen in Aces: Iron Eagle III.
• Have you seen Getaway?  Did you like it?  Are there any driving movies you like or dislike?  Are there other tropes that I should have mentioned in this post?  You can answer these questions or talk about anything else I wrote in this post by using the comments.
• If you want to suggest a movie for me to watch for a future Sunday “Bad” Movie post, you can mention it in the comments.  You can also tell me on Twitter or you can email me at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.
• Next week, the movie I will write about is Up the Academy, the only movie to come out of Mad Magazine, when they wanted the film success of National Lampoon.  I haven’t seen it, but I’m excited to check this one out.  I’ll see you next week.