Film review: A Perfect Getaway

Published on Thursday 13 August 2009 19:07

A PERFECT GETAWAY (15) **** DIRECTED BY: DAVID TWOHY STARRING: STEVE ZAHN, MILLA JOVOVICH, TIMOTHY OLYPHANT, KIELE SANCHEZ

BECAUSE most summer blockbusters – especially most of this year's summer blockbusters – are little more than over-inflated, under-achieving B-movies, it's easy to forget the pleasure that can be had watching a B-movie that hues to a more traditional interpretation of the term.

With its generic but effective title, its "romantic couple in peril" premise, its cast of recognisable but hardly box-office names and its determination to entertain without any of the attendant hype that comes from having to be the biggest, most awesome movie of the summer, A Perfect Getaway actually manages to be one of the few purely entertaining American mainstream movie releases of recent months.

Written and directed by David Twohy (best known for Pitch Black and its abysmal mega-budget sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick), it's no candidate for greatness, but it's an above-average, well-crafted slab of mainstream entertainment with an old-fashioned belief that audience engagement (even at this time of year) should be earned, not contemptuously expected just because money has been thrown at the screen. It also has enough knowledge of, and respect for, the traditions of the B-movie to subvert them a little. Repeatedly drawing attention to the mechanics of the thriller, Twohy not only wants to make sure we're fully aware of the fact that he's setting us up for a gimmicky twist, he wants to make sure we're distracted enough to embrace this twist in all its loopiness when it comes.

Kicking off with a few shakily-shot wedding video testimonials, we're soon introduced to our protagonists, honeymooning couple Cliff and Cydney Anderson (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich), who have decided to capitalise on their nuptials with a trip to Hawaii and a 12-mile hike across rough terrain of varying altitude in order to get to a remote stretch of beach with blue oceans and gorgeous sunsets.

Alas, too busy are they organising their hiking permits and loading up their rental jeep, they neglect to notice a newspaper headline detailing the discovery of a couple of murdered tourists on a neighbouring island.

Instead, they head off into the wilderness, where they run into Nick (Timothy Olyphant), a gregarious alpha male with a sly smile, a nice line in (possibly) tall tales and a massive hunting knife strapped to his ankle. After he provides a much-needed helping hand to Cydney when she takes a wrong step while trying to negotiate a vertiginous waterfall, they decide to join him and his Southern belle girlfriend, Gina (Kiele Sanchez), and push on to the beach together.

This is after they learn about the aforementioned murders from a group of teenage backpackers blessed with limited mobile-phone reception.

Safety in numbers and a "what are the odds?" attitude seem to be the reasons they decide to continue, but when it emerges that the police suspect a man and a woman of perpetrating the killings, Cliff grows more anxious. He's already managed to offend one dodgy-looking pair of hitchhikers by blatantly lying to them about his and Cydney's travel plan and Nick's stories about his army days, his self-proclaimed survival instincts and his ability to hunt wild animals (and Gina's ability to gut them without batting an eye) are doing little to calm him.

It's here that Twohy starts having fun with tired old genre conventions. Cliff, it turns out, is a screenwriter with his first Hollywood script in pre-production, a detail that immediately intrigues Nick, who fancies himself as a man with stories ripe for the movies. Amusing discussions about three-act structures, twist endings and red herrings – or as the film has it, "red snappers" – duly follow, allowing Twohy to wink at the audience and encourage us to draw easy conclusions, before turning them on their head in nutty fashion by returning to some of the more throwaway details contained within these meta-discussions.

It's a fun piece of misdirection, like the first Scream movie but less annoying. Twohy has sensibly assembled a cast of decent actors with smarts enough to strike the right balance between self-awareness and having enough respect for the demands of the thriller to ensure we buy into it.

This is not a film that requires a lot of deep soul-searching or complex characterisation, but it does depend on us caring about the characters, at least enough to want things to turn out OK for them. It also requires a little nuance to ensure we don't feel cheated come the final reel, and Zahn, Jovovich, Olyphant and Sanchez make this a little easier to accept.

It helps that Twohy understands the benefits of building up tension slowly. He may not have a flashy visual style, but it's effective in a meat-and-potatoes kind of way; he keeps the camera tight when it needs to be and gives his actors room to manoeuvre when they require it.

It's also good to be confronted with a filmmaker who has enough confidence in his storytelling abilities not only to be upfront about exposing all his narrative tricks, but to have the skills to execute them without tying himself in knots.

Too many films of this type have nonsensical scenes tacked on because the writer or director has no idea how to resolve the plot or, worse, a studio has allowed a test audience to decide which shock ending they like best.

A Perfect Getaway doesn't suffer from such afflictions. Its finale may be a little silly – OK, a lot silly – but it doesn't betray what has gone before. To paraphrase Nick, it's all about good detail and this film thrives on that. It's satisfying in all the ways a modern B-movie should be.