“A Perfect Getaway” barely registered in terms of box-office gross last weekend, but it’s a very entertaining and very unpretentious little horror movie with a neat twist at the end.
The movie’s reliance on solid acting and clever plotting seems positively old-fashioned in this era of torture porn like the “Saw” series and the recent “The Collector.”
The art of good storytelling has been lost in the suspense genre in recent years — horror these days is mostly about shocks and explosions of gore strung together with little rhyme or reason.
The slasher flick craze that was so big in the late 1970s and early 1980s was more or less played out by the mid-1990s, but then the clever horror comedy “Scream” revived the genre.
Ironically, the slasher cliches that “Scream” parodied have come back in straight form for a whole new generation of teens (Do you believe that a remake of “Halloween 2″ is opening at end of the month?)
“A Perfect Getaway” has a teasing plot in which three couples converge in an isolated part of Hawaii — just after the brutal murder of a couple in Honolulu — and through the use of good character actors like Steve Zahn (above, with Milla Jovovich) and Timothy Olyphant we can never be quite sure who will survive the movie (and who the actual killer or killers might be).
There are bits of several old thrillers knocking around in “A Perfect Getaway” — everything from “Deliverance” to “The Talented Mr. Ripley” — but writer-director David Twohy mixes the pieces up with wit and genuine creepiness.
But can you buy that Milla Jovovich is married to Steve Zahn? He’s a cute guy, but I was more ready to see him as the goofy, man-child exterminator in Saving Silverman than as the hubby to a supermodel. If I married someone that out of my league, it wouldn’t shock me that they were in fact a serial killer. It’s just too good to be true. But I haven’t seen the movie yet.
Comment by Francesca — August 12th, 2009 @ 11:09 pm
Milla is more down-to-earth than usual in this flick and she and Zahn have real chemistry together – it might be the first time she’s played a real person since “Dazed & Confused” way back when. I haven’t seen “Management” but I’ve been told that Zahn works well with J. Aniston in that one. He’s a good team player – Zahn even made Paul Walker act livelier than usual when they played brothers in that entertaining old B-movie “Joy Ride”
Comment by Joe — August 13th, 2009 @ 11:30 am