The Getaway **** (1994, Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger, Michael Madsen, James Woods) – Classic Movie Review 2228

Director Roger Donaldson’s 1994 action crime thriller is a surprise remake of the Steve McQueen-Ali MacGraw 1972 classic favourite. This time Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger star as the crooks on the run from both the Mob and the cops. The casting’s canny as Baldwin and Basinger were a couple when this film was made, the same as McQueen and MacGraw were when they starred in the original Getaway. But it’s not just a gimmick, the poignant casting pays off handsomely.

‘Doc’ McCoy (Baldwin) gets arrested and put in prison while doing a job in Mexico and his wife Carol (Basinger) has to sleep with a mob boss called Jack Benyon (James Woods) to get him out of jail. McCoy has to agree that he’s for sale if Benyon can pull some strings and get him free. Then the couple have to rob a race-track alongside a psychotic crook by the name of Rudy Travis (Michael Madsen), the very man responsible for McCoy’s capture by the cops. But the hard part is the getaway…

At the beginning of the movie, the action starts all too hesitantly and director Donaldson and screenwriters Walter Hill and Amy Holden Jones make too little sense out of the complex plot taken from Jim Thompson’s pulp thriller. Even the robbery set piece seems botched. But, at about the half way mark, the movie springs into sizzling life as it suddenly picks up and goes into overdrive to excite with red-hot action and cool-blue sex scenes.

Basinger is very fired up and makes a lot out of her role, indeed more out of it than Baldwin, who is properly cool and intense but battling the writing of his character as a one-dimensional anti-hero. Though both of them are good, and not overshadowed by rememberances of McQueen and MacGraw, they are still upstaged by Woods’s twitchy acting as the deranged mob boss and especially by Madsen’s bravura portrait of unhinged villainy.

Also in the strong cast are Jennifer Tilly, Richard Farnsworth, David Morse, Philip Seymour Hoffman (as Frank Hansen) and James Stephens.

The hotel where Baldwin and Basinger stay at the end of the movie is the same as the one where McQueen and MacGraw stayed at the end of The Getaway (1972).

Philip Seymour Hoffman died of acute mixed drug intoxication on February 2 2014, aged 46.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2228

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