Holy shit.

When former race car driver Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) comes home and finds his home ransacked and his wife missing he quickly receives a call from a mysterious voice that sounds a lot like Jon Voight doing a non-specific Eastern-European accent that tells him that he needs to go to a particular car in a particular garage. Once Magna does this he finds a tricked out Mustang Shelby with all kinds of cameras screwed into it and he gets more instructions from the Voice. If he doesn’t do everything that he is told or if he goes to the cops or is caught by the cops then his wife will be killed. What these tasks consist of is an increasingly ridiculous litany of goofy nonsense that eventually leads him to another garage where his vehicle is boarded by a gun toting Kid (Selena Gomez) who sticks a gun in his face and becomes embroiled in the fiasco for the express purpose, apparently, of screaming and being incapable of grasping the most basic of plot details. The story unfolds like if Die Hard With a Vengeance was hit in the head with a frying pan and then sewn to the ass of the Fast and the Furious with Driver sewn to its ass Human Centipede style and then they were all given roofies. Then Taken showed up and got stuck on the back.

This is easily one of the worst movies of the year if not the worst. Every aspect of the film that could go wrong does outside of the fact that there is picture and sound. Throughout most of the movie’s length I desperately wished that neither of those things were true. The story makes no sense and is full of holes. There is no consistency from scene to scene from basic motivations to something like a side mirror being smashed off the car and then miraculously restored two scenes later. The acting ranges from passable to god awful. The action is incoherent and more a collection of disparate scenes thatched together with quick cuts and a fervent hope that if the images change fast enough the audience won’t notice how ridiculous and boring all of this is. That is a futile hope.

I really hate when film critics say movies look like video games because I think it is an overused criticism that usually betrays that critic’s lack of understanding of what video games are and what they look like . So it is with a somewhat heavy heart I have to level this same criticism on this movie. Structurally this thing is built like a video game complete with levels and missions for the characters to go on as assigned by the Voice. I think the screenwriters must have been playing Burnout or Need For Speed Hot Pursuit and said ‘yeah lets do that with Ethan Hawke and a shrill post-teen harpy.’ The movie surrounding the action looks like cutscenes that do little more than provide a reason for the next bit of action but unfortunately with a video game you are controlling the action. Here you are sitting by watching the most nonsensical driving scenes I have ever seen. Someone should pull director Courtney Solomon aside and let him know that we have good driving movies out there with legitimately cool driving action so just showing constant jump cuts of cars driving down narrow streets or taking quick corners is not going to cut it anymore. When your whole movie is an excuse to watch driving action and then that driving action sucks enormous balls you are really in trouble.

A compelling story would be nice but even with the thin attempts to add depth to it by inserting character background details like the Kid being the daughter of a leading investment banker and having been just as manipulated into the situation as Magna was but this doesn’t work because A: It just adds more noise to an already loud and incoherent picture and B: it is completely undermined by not ever even giving that character a name. Seriously, she is listed in the credits as The Kid. She even mentions that Magna doesn’t know her name. Seems to me if it is important enough to have her there to completely misinterpret simple facts in front of her, scream CONSTANTLY and occasionally hack some computer systems with conveniently placed plug ins in the car then it should be important enough to give her a name.

Likewise, we have a mystery villain called the Voice who is doing this very expensive and elaborate ‘game’ with Brent Magna (they can’t give the sidekick or villain a name but god knows they say this guy’s name every four minutes) for no real apparent reason. Sure, money and all that but the motivation for doing things this way is enormously loose and arbitrary.

So we don’t have satisfaction on the action or story, what about the performances? Nope. Ethan Hawke doesn’t embarrass himself too much here aside from admitting that he clearly either doesn’t read scripts he agrees to or he has a deep dark secret that plenty of directors have access to pictures of, but that really isn’t saying much. Selena Gomez is absolutely infuriating in this movie and I wanted to leave roughly two minutes after she got in the car. A lot of this I blame on the script for making the character completely devoid of any common sense or ability to process information…like how she is shown evidence right away that Magna’s wife has been kidnapped and he is being forced into doing what he is doing or the Voice will kill her and the Kid still continues to call him a criminal and act as if it is all just him. This goes on for a ridiculous amount of time. So that isn’t her fault outside of not saying no to this thing in the first place. And Maybe it is Courtney Solomon’s fault that she does nothing but scream incoherent directions and profanity during the chase scenes but still I don’t know if I ever want to see her in anything again because her voice now irritates me more than a morning alarm when you’ve only had 45 minutes of good sleep. Jon Voight’s chin and bearded lips does a fairly terrible job at the Voice as well. Not only is his accent horrifying in ways I only thought Travolta’s in the Killing Season could be but watching close ups of Voight’s mouth eating was starting to make me ill.

Solomon does attempt some interesting POV camera shots in the beginning and end of the movie but like everything else in the movie, these do not connect. These shots would be really cool if there was anything even remotely worth watching in them but they are really boring. The one at the end, during a pivotal chase scene, looks like it is moving about 25mph with very little movement. I have seen what it looks like to tailgate a black SUV in a residential and I didn’t feel like I needed to make a movie about it. Dashboard cams from Real Stories of the Highway Patrol are about 100 times more exciting than this and they have a better narrative and pay off.

Conclusion [1.0 out of 10]

I don’t feel like I can give this less than a one if only because there were moving pictures and sound on the screen for 90 minutes. Other than that, I hated this movie to a ridiculous degree and I think it may be the punishment for murder in some countries. Or it likely soon will be. I cannot recommend this under any circumstances aside from outright mockery of it and even then you are probably going to come out with some internal bleeding. Avoid at all costs.