Films like The Getaway are always fascinating to me on one level. That's because they demonstrate how important the most elemental and obvious choices in storytelling are and getting just one simple thing wrong can hamstring even the most talented filmmakers and performers. This movie is well written and nicely plotted. It has plenty of action and a couple of nice sex scenes. The cast is as good as you'll get for this sort of thing and the direction is unobjectionably competent. All of that goes almost entirely to waste, however, because the two main characters here are unsympathetic criminals whom the audience has no reason whatsoever to root for or care about what happens to them.
Don't get me wrong. You can make a compelling and involving film about bad people. The star of every story doesn't have to be some selfless, noble champion of truth, justice and the American way. But if you're going to make a motion picture about a cold blooded villain, you've got to treat him as such and not try to pass him off as a hero. People like looking at sharks but they won't respond to you trying to pretend a great white shark is as cute and relatively harmless as a bottlenose dolphin.
Carter "Doc" McCoy (Alec Baldwin) is a smart and stylish thief who can pretty much figure out how to get in anywhere to get anything. Teamed with his beautiful and devoted wife Carol (Kim Basinger), the two pass through a series of twists and turns until they end up on the run from a treacherous partner, some vengeance-seeking gunmen and the law enforcement. And let me stress again, all of that is well executed. Maybe The Getaway isn't a great action-adventure flick, but it's got all the right parts moving in all the right ways to be a very good one.
None of it matters much because the movie never gives you a reason to really care if Doc and Carol live or die, succeed or fail, get caught and sent to prison or escape and live happily ever after. I don't think Doc does a single good or admirable thing until 90 minutes into the film. He's portrayed as a remorseless criminal who has not trouble at all assaulting an innocent cab driver or committing attempted murder by firing a shotgun at pursuing cops. The only good thing Carol does involved morally compromising herself to benefit Doc, which largely negates any credit she gets for being selfless.
The Getaway rises and falls on one question. Why should the viewer cheer for Doc and Carol while booing their enemies? No explanation is ever provided, other than the charisma of its two stars. Well, Kim Basinger can project a fragile vulnerability like nobody's business but Carol is bound at the hip to Doc and for all of Alec Baldwin's dramatic and comedic abilities, he's never been a performer who radiated likability. At least not until he let himself get fat for TV. Now, I haven't seen the original and don't know how it handled the question of why people should care about these two characters. Maybe Steve McQueen could pull off what Baldwin couldn't or maybe the audience of the early 70s was more inclined to support unrepentant bad guys like Doc McCoy. This remake doesn't answer the question at all, let alone answer it badly.
It would not be at all fair to call The Getaway a bad movie. It's never boring, the action scenes are pretty good and Basinger gets naked on more than one occasion, at least in the unrated version I saw. But I wouldn't have cared a whit if Doc and Carol had wound up dead in the desert instead of riding off into the sunset. I suppose someone else might like it much more than I, but I think the general reaction would be a shrug and the statement "Well, that was okay". In other words, if you've got nothing better to do, there are worse ways of wasting your time.
Don't get me wrong. You can make a compelling and involving film about bad people. The star of every story doesn't have to be some selfless, noble champion of truth, justice and the American way. But if you're going to make a motion picture about a cold blooded villain, you've got to treat him as such and not try to pass him off as a hero. People like looking at sharks but they won't respond to you trying to pretend a great white shark is as cute and relatively harmless as a bottlenose dolphin.
Carter "Doc" McCoy (Alec Baldwin) is a smart and stylish thief who can pretty much figure out how to get in anywhere to get anything. Teamed with his beautiful and devoted wife Carol (Kim Basinger), the two pass through a series of twists and turns until they end up on the run from a treacherous partner, some vengeance-seeking gunmen and the law enforcement. And let me stress again, all of that is well executed. Maybe The Getaway isn't a great action-adventure flick, but it's got all the right parts moving in all the right ways to be a very good one.
None of it matters much because the movie never gives you a reason to really care if Doc and Carol live or die, succeed or fail, get caught and sent to prison or escape and live happily ever after. I don't think Doc does a single good or admirable thing until 90 minutes into the film. He's portrayed as a remorseless criminal who has not trouble at all assaulting an innocent cab driver or committing attempted murder by firing a shotgun at pursuing cops. The only good thing Carol does involved morally compromising herself to benefit Doc, which largely negates any credit she gets for being selfless.
The Getaway rises and falls on one question. Why should the viewer cheer for Doc and Carol while booing their enemies? No explanation is ever provided, other than the charisma of its two stars. Well, Kim Basinger can project a fragile vulnerability like nobody's business but Carol is bound at the hip to Doc and for all of Alec Baldwin's dramatic and comedic abilities, he's never been a performer who radiated likability. At least not until he let himself get fat for TV. Now, I haven't seen the original and don't know how it handled the question of why people should care about these two characters. Maybe Steve McQueen could pull off what Baldwin couldn't or maybe the audience of the early 70s was more inclined to support unrepentant bad guys like Doc McCoy. This remake doesn't answer the question at all, let alone answer it badly.
It would not be at all fair to call The Getaway a bad movie. It's never boring, the action scenes are pretty good and Basinger gets naked on more than one occasion, at least in the unrated version I saw. But I wouldn't have cared a whit if Doc and Carol had wound up dead in the desert instead of riding off into the sunset. I suppose someone else might like it much more than I, but I think the general reaction would be a shrug and the statement "Well, that was okay". In other words, if you've got nothing better to do, there are worse ways of wasting your time.