The result suggests "Speed" crossed with the "Fast" franchise and reimagined as a big screen videogame with actors. Brent is the player. Every action setpiece is a level. The sadistic puppetmaster pulling Brent's strings is the Big Bad, or ultimate villain. The pistol-packing computer whiz teen that Brent takes along for the ride—Selena Gomez, whose character is known only as The Kid—is a human book of Cheat Codes: a stealth exposition machine who was put in that car for a reason, and ends up helping the driver on his quest.

This may sound like a fine idea for a film whose main purpose is to showcase vehicles speeding, cornering, jumping and blowing up. John Frankenheimer's "Ronin" might be the greatest example of a movie that's mainly about speed for speed's sake. The racecar-loving director admitted that that 1998 classic's story was mostly a pretext for chases and lovely French scenery.

But the truly great chase pictures aren't solely about car chases. They create memorable characters who work at cross-purposes, so that the cars become extensions of the characters' personalities and desires, rather than machines that just happen to contain talking mammals. "Getaway" is all speed, all the time. Too much of the action feels weirdly anonymous. Much of it is shot in the fashionable Chaos Cinema style, where the cuts last two seconds and you rarely get a sense of where people or vehicles are in relation to each other. This approach ruins one's ability to appreciate the stuntpeoples' skill and the beauty of cars in motion, if indeed the director Courtney Solomon cared about such things in the first place, which I doubt he did.

We don't get the compensatory pleasures of watching people we care about fight for things that seem to matter because Solomon and his credited screenwriters, Gregg Maxwell Parker and Sean Finnegan, have saddled Hawke, Gomez and Voight with non-characters, and put weak dialogue in their mouths. ("Do me a favor, shut the hell up, will ya?" Brent snarls. "You shut up!" The Kid retorts.) Hawke does the best he can in a mostly unwritten role, but he's dull; Gomez chirps and grates; Voight is just lips, stubble and an accent. The treatment of Brent's wife Leanne (Rebecca Budig) goes beyond disappointing and into offensive. She has no personality. Her character consists of being terrorized in in a dungeon by swarthy goons. Solomon cuts to her tear-streaked face, or lets Brent hear her cries of pain and fear over the phone, to jack up the film's flagging energy. The bad guy might as well have kidnapped a puppy.