A Perfect Getaway Movie Review
"The Perfect Getaway" is a cleverly dumb movie.
Clever because its trailers are based on a self-spoiler (crazed killers in Hawaii), but then it overcomes that by some fancy moves.
Dumb because a. the surprises make no sense, and b. it will take 97 potentially better-used minutes from your life.
And yet, clever because it doesn't run 2 1/2 hours as is the lamentable custom of Hollywood these days.
Whatever you may expect from the writer of "Waterworld," this is a better effort from David Twohy, and as a director, he is OK, if not much better than that.
Against the buzz of murders on Oahu (the Hawaii Visitors Bureau will thank the filmmakers, I am sure), newlyweds Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich (looking not at all as in "The Fifth Element," a personal favorite) seek out the most remote spot on Kauai all the better to tempt fate.
They are joined by Timothy Olyphant (best performance in the film) and Kiele Sanchez, and a few other characters, all suspicious.
Will the murderers find them? Who are they? Who will survive? Who is the bad guy (or gal)? And so on. You know da kine, they'd say in the Islands.
Back to the clever/dumb dichotomy: Twohy's script dares - and succeeds - in peppering the dialogue with funny insider references to Hollywood scripts and actors. There is a self-referential thread all the way through it - "would a red herring appear at a time like this" - and that's certainly amusing.
Amusing is the point of this otherwise pointless movie, and remember that great bonus: it's only 97 minutes.
