This is the dumbest movie I've seen all year. Ethan Hawke comes home to find his wife kidnapped and a cell phone ringing. He answers and gets instructions. If he wants to see his wife alive again, he will follow the instructions. These involve stealing a car, evading the police, driving through crowded parks and other nonsense.
Some movies require you to suspend disbelief. This movie requires you to turn your brain off completely. The things the voice on the phone requires him to do are completely ridiculous. For no reason, he has to drive through the middle of a park and skating rink on Christmas Eve. Now it's not uncommon to see a car driving on a sidewalk, and miraculously everyone is able to jump out of the way just in time. But there is no way in hell that he could drive through the crowds he does without killing lots and lots of pedestrians.
Every 10 minutes, he's in a car chase with the police. Every time, they end the same way. Once again, no one is killed even though every cop car is smashed and destroyed in the chase. You would think that after 3 or 4 chases where he gets away every time and destroys a bunch of cars, eventually they would try to find a different way to stop his car.
Selena Gomez is also in this movie. She plays the owner of the car who tries to get it back from Hawke. She gets in with a gun, he overpowers her, and before he can kick her out the voice tells him to keep her with him. First he is ordered to kill her, and when he says no (he'll drive through a crowd of people but shooting someone is where he draws the line), the voice says "That's the right answer." Really? So the voice is just testing him or something? Anyway, the voice tells him to keep the girl with him, so she becomes his sidekick. And her performance in this movie is terrible. I don't know how much of the fault lies with Gomez and how much lies with the director Courtney Solomon, but her performance is so awful I was rooting for Hawke to shoot her within 5 minutes.
When we eventually find out they are going to all this trouble (something about providing a distraction so they could steal some hard drives), it doesn't amount to much. There was really no reason to put him through the challenges of the first hour of the movie unless they are just sadistic. But there is no way they could know that he would be able to evade the police for so long, or go through so many red lights without getting killed.
Just a dumb movie. I'm getting tired of even writing about it. So I'm going to stop there.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment