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Review: A Perfect Getaway - from 27 January
2009-12-14 21:44
A Perfect Getaway
Cinemas throughout the region from 27 January
This movie gives a whole new spin to the expression ‘fighting tooth and nail’, since it is the extraction of those particular body-parts that is the gruesome calling card of the mystery murderers on an idyllic Hawaiian island. Whether any of the three couples holidaying in this paradise will escape with their jaws and fingers intact is what keeps the audience rivetted to their seats for the duration of David Twohy’s 97-minute escapade.
The film neatly blends farce and terror, making light of the nagging doubts that afflict all travellers (what’s happened to our beach permits, should we pick up hitch-hikers, is the honeymoon going to be the dream that was promised), while revelling in high-octane paranoia of the but-what-if-these-innocent-looking-friends-we-just-made-are-really-the-gruesome-twosome-on-the-run-from-the-police variety.
When Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that she ‘can’t imagine what goes on behind faces’ she might as well have been commenting on this thriller, for the director has chosen to play with his audience in a way which prompts us again and again to revise our opinions of the lead characters.
And ultimately it’s the degree to which we are manipulated that spoils the movie. It’s all well and good for the director rather than the characters themselves to notice, say, the newspaper front-page announcing the murders; or to direct the camera towards crucial details that enable us to follow (like the backpackers’ trail itself) a particular line of investigation only to lead us to dead-ends – that’s the stuff of all such movies.
But when we are required to abandon the viewpoints of all his characters and to go only with Twohy’s, the plot becomes strained beyond belief. The entire preceding story becomes so unbelievable that it has to be replayed to us in black-and-white, as if we had missed something. This is far more subtly done in, say, The Sixth Sense, which has the audience all going ‘Aaaaah!’ as the penny finally drops. In A Perfect Getaway, the audience go ‘Ouch!’ as the crowbar clangs to the cutting-room floor.
If you enjoy intelligent thrillers, you will warm to the first half of this movie. The final twenty minutes, however, will have you thinking again of the title as you exit the cinema.