Waste of time

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Let me start to say, for purists, that Sam Peckinpah is one of my all time favorite directors and an inovator on staging action sequences and handling over-the-top violence to the screen and the original "The Getaway", starring the then couple Steve McQueen & Ali McGraw, remains untouchable and a cult classic of the action / crime / thriller genre. However, and even if i usually despise modern remakes (except in some cases), this Roger Donaldson's rendition of Peckinpah's cult flick is in fact a very good entry in the genre.By 1994, this Aussie director was already an established director in U.S.A. after he helm'd the political thriller "No Way Out" ('87) starring Kevin Costner in one of his first leading roles, Gene Hackman and Sean Young; the romance / drama "Cocktail" ('88) starring Tom Cruise and Elisabeth Shue or "White Sands" ('92), an extremely underrated crime / thriller film starring Willem Dafoe, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Samuel L. Jackson and Mickey Rourke and was chosen to fill Peckinpah's shoes directing this remake which Donaldson did with his peculiar sense of visual style, well-staged action sequences and a bunch of good actors giving life to vivid and colorful characters."The Getaway" moves frantically forward, with a great sense of pace and editing; the screenplay by Walter Hill, who also penned the original movie, based on the 1958 crime novel by Jim Thompson, is incisive and straight to the point, enhancing the 1972 version to the more sophisticated 90's, but without losing its soul and stamina on the process.The casting of the then couple, Alec Baldwin & Kim Basinger as the McCoy couple, provides almost the same McQueen / McGraw electric on screen chemistry and even if Baldwin wasn't on McQueen's level, let's be honest, who was ?The supporting cast is near perfection: the always sleazy and a riot to watch, James Woods (he would play almost the same character in the next year's "The Specialist" starring Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and Eric Roberts); the forever underrated character actor, David Morse; the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (credited as Philip Hoffman) in one of his first major roles; "The Straight Story" beloved old timer, Richard Farnsworth and Burton Gilliam, but Michael Madsen as the quirky & vicious, Rudy Travis and Jennifer Tilly as his submissive girlfriend, Fran Carvey, made a cool looney couple that almost stole the movie from the leads.An interesting fact is that Madsen plays his character so Mickey Rourke-ish: his manneirisms and on-screen persona; the machismo, self-confident arrogance & misogynism; the eccentric urban cowboy clothes ("Wild Orchid"); the chopper and even the hairstyle (Rourke was sporting long blonde / reddish hair back in 1993 when this movie went into production, check "The Last Outlaw") that maybe it's possible that Mickey Rourke was the first choice for the role (he already worked with the screenwriter Walter Hill in "Johnny Handsome" ('89) and two years before with Donaldson in "White Sands", which he played Gorman Lennox, a very similar character to Rudy), but after the troublesome shooting of "Nine and a Half Weeks" ('86) and Baldwin's crescent stardom against Rourke's career decline, the couple probably vetoed to his casting.In short, "The Getaway" isn't by all means a masterpiece movie, neither the original was, it was unfairly bashed by critics and nominated for of few Razzies (the same Razzies that nominated Kubrick for worst director, can you get how laughable this Awards are ?), but aside of all the badmouthin, it's a very entertaining, sexy, steamy & stylish flick that can put the nowadays action / crime / thrillers to shame.I give it an 8, because it's a remake, but it's worthy of a 8.5 !!

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.

I have not seen this movie in ages but figured I'd comment on it anyway, mostly because the memory of disliking it so intently is burned into my memory cells. The original THE GETAWAY was no prize to begin with but at least had the distinctions of being 1) A Sam Peckinpah movie, 2) Featured Steve McQueen, Ben Johnson, and Slim Pickens, 3) Was a relatively painless way to blow away an hour and a half of time.By comparison, the 1994 version comes across as little more than a vanity piece for the then red hot Alec Baldwin and his soon to be divorced wife, Kim Basinger. McQueen and his then wife Allie McBride also split up soon after their version of the film was made and one can sort of picture the Baldwins at their marriage councilor arguing over who's stupid idea it was to make this movie.Let's just get it said and out of the way -- Alec Baldwin never was and never will be anything close to the Cooler King, and one of the reasons why this remake annoyed me so much is the perceived arrogance on Baldwin's part to presume to challenge our memory of Steve McQueen in the lead role. Like someone else points out, Peckinpah's 1972 vision of the film was a satire piece meant to sort of parody the action/adventure heist genre. By contrast Baldwin, Bassinger & company seem to be trying to evoke a more serious tone, with only Michael Madsen's and James Woods' slimy unprincipled villain characters coming off as real people.The movie is also decidedly mean spirited and unlikeable at a fundamental level that is difficult to put into words. One viewing was more than enough, not just because it didn't have anything new to offer but because of how artlessly it was made. Peckinpah's movie was actually a stylish little entertainment that had an upbeat mood, where this version is a slog that takes too long to amount to little or nothing. There's no artistic urgency to it's existence and some of the more uncomfortable scenes are so uncomfortable that they make the film difficult to enjoy.So I don't know, this was probably one of the films that helped to initiate the wave of pointless, artistically vapid big budget remakes propped up around a then name brand actor/actress, which in itself isn't a really good thing. I'd always rather see a filmmaker at least try to come up with a new idea for a movie & fall flat with something original. This movie just made me want to pull my eyebrows out, and it's revealing that over the ensuing 15 years since it's release Mr. Baldwin has become widely renowned as one of the biggest jerks in Hollywood. Thank god for "Team America" for putting him in his place.3/10

Nowhere near the original. It's quite accurate copy bringing nothing new to the story. But the directing is very poor. Basinger is weak - without good directing. Baldwin is simply just a second league compared to McQueen. I watched it just out of curiosity, being a huge fan of Peckinpah's masterpiece, and I got what I thought. Almost a B movie with second rate acting and directing. I wasn't even disappointed, I just don't know what they were trying to do. This remake doesn't try to play with the original material, it's not a tribute and indeed it lacks some really good actor of its era.It reminds me of a bad xerox copy of wonderful photograph.This is a complete waste of your time. Save yourself 2 hours or watch the original (again:)))