Movie Review: 'Get Out While You Can' is as Much Advice as it is a Title

Imagine being trapped on a boat in the middle of the ocean, no land in sight. Now imagine it’s you and the most insufferable, bickering married couple you can imagine. That’s the equivalent experience of watching the new movie Get Away if You Can. A romantic boat trip intended to save a marriage becomes a slog from one boring encounter to the next, and from one obnoxious argument to another.

Get Away if You Can was written by, directed, and stars Dominique Braun and Riley Smith as the married couple. She’s from Brazil, he comes from a wealthy family in the boat business, headed up by his domineering father, played by Ed Harris. While he is deeply in love with his wife, the man’s family is opposed to his wife. The man’s father is fully convinced that the wife is a golddigger who is out to get her son’s fortune after Dad kicks off.

Before the boat trip, Dad was even enlisting the man’s brother to convince him to leave his wife. Dad has been secretly trying to upend the marriage, something we see in flashbacks as the wife recalls the times when her father in-law was openly rude or disgusting in hopes of creating a rift in the marriage. Naturally, the man doesn’t believe his wife’s stories. This is among the many divides between husband and wife.

The breaking point comes several weeks into their romantic boat trip. The wife wants to stop and rest at a deserted island. The husband doesn’t want to stop on the island, he wants to continue on to their planned destination, which is still a few days away. While he gets drunk and falls asleep, she goes ashore without him. This leads to several days divided between arguments and periods of lonely lamenting.

Then, the husband does something completely insane to kick off the final act of Get Away if You Can. I’m not going to spoil it, even as I do not recommend this movie. I do respect the creation of the movie enough not to ruin it for those who might give the movie a try. I will say, the movie has a professional quality, it’s shot well, it’s edited well, and the acting isn’t bad. Ed Harris certainly elevates the proceedings, even as his character is, perhaps, even more insufferable than the main married couple.

At a thin 85 minutes, including beginning and ending credits, Get Away If You Can is polite enough to be short, by typical movie standard. That said, the endless cycle of bickering and flashbacks, make the movie feel twice as long as the 85 minute run time. There is simply nothing interesting or revealing about this bickering. There is no bite or charm to the dialogue. The script seems to be going for something more realistic, married couple shorthand tends not to be as entertaining or loquacious as some movies make them out to be.

That said, other filmmakers recognize how boring married bickering can be in real life. That’s why they tend to spice up the dialogue with charged emotional jabs or wordy insults, something to give the bickering more personality. No such luck here as the main couple of Get Away If You Can seem to boil their bickering down to ‘Leave Me Alone’ she says, ‘But babe,’ he says. And that’s about what we get.

As for the big insane kick off to the third act, it is certainly a thing that happens. It’s a bizarre choice but it is a welcome one as most of the second act is spent in boring flashbacks or screeching arguments. I was desperate for something to happen in the movie and while I may not have bought into the crazy idea that the husband comes up with, it was, at the very, very least, something other than what had been happening to that point.

I don’t recommend it, but if you are somehow so inclined, if you're some weird Ed Harris completist, then Get Away If You Can will be in theaters and available on demand on August 19th, 2022.