Getaway (2013)

The 2013 “Getaway” is terrible. Horribly “Can You Believe This Shit!?!” bad. Do not confuse it with the 1970s Steve McQueen flick or its Alec Baldwin remake. This stiff has Ethan Hawke as Brent Magna, an ex-NASCAR driver living in Bulgaria (!?!) who steals a Mustang and causes havoc on Sofia streets as ordered by an unseen criminal mastermind who has kidnapped Magna’s wife as collateral. Brent’s task: Blow up the city’s power station –- protected with a key pad lock (!) -– so the mastermind can pull off a daring robbery in darkness. The howler: Brent destroys the power grid … and not a street light blinks or a McDonald’s arch darkens. Nothing. Nadda. But. BUT. The actors pretend it is pitch dark. Seriously. The leap of logic gymnastics is breathtaking. Director Courtney Solomon -– he made the incompetent “Dungeons & Dragons” -– shoots and edits every car chase -– it’s nothing but –- as split-second visual seizures, and repeats the same footage. Hawke must have been desperate for money. The final nail: Selena Gomez (!?!) plays a pistol-packing carjacker. GTFO. F

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Age of Extinction” is a 170-minute endurance test thud thud thuding loud as slick CGI and slo-mo explosions litter the screen with buildings, trains, and cars crashing and people running about, always at magic hour. In Bay’s world, every day has five sunsets. The original cast is out, replaced by Mark Wahlberg as a Texas inventor/redneck/father with a Boston accent who happens upon wounded alien robot hero Optimus Prime -– stoic Autobot leader -– and ends up chased by Uncle Sam thugs led by Kelsey Grammer. Our heroes bolt to Utah then Chicago and then Hong Kong, because in China everyone knows kung fu. And Asia means box office coin. Thousands of people die as robots fight and Wahlbeg’s dad saves his pretty teen girl (Nicola Peltz) whose ass Bay glares at, endlessly. The script talks the death of original cinema early on, but “T4” unironically regurgitates films 1-3 and stacks bewildering logic lapses one upon the other. Greatest jaw-dropper: Beijing and Hong Kong within a short drive. Even by the greatest allowance for “dumb” fun and the occasional jolt of a cool image (all those sunsets), Bay’s films are cinema’s death. Soulless, brainless empty robots. D

The Oxford Murders (2008)

There is much to laugh at in “The Oxford Murders,” a serial murder thriller mixing in philosophy, math, and Frodo (Elijah Wood) as a hunk of smooth manliness wooing the English ladies with spaghetti and meatball themed sex. Not intended as a comedy, this flick is hilarious. Wood stars an American student who puts all his life into entering Oxford U to study under John Hunt’s wild-haired fruit loop professor’s logic class only to learn after his arrival on campus that the professor has retired from teaching. The kid is stunned. Really? Adults wrote and directed. The adults are Jorge Guerricaechevarria and Álex de la Iglesia (real names?) and they dish up all the genre thriller clichés sprinkled with inane philosophical babble and algorithm riddles that only nerds must think clever, with Wood – I must mention this again – as the stud wooing woman thrillingly open to pasta experimentation. Might all this be satire? Dig Jim Carter’s inspector who slowly catches on that serial murderers kill multiple victims. Dud. D+