Not Quite THE PERFECT GETAWAY
A Perfect Getaway seemed sort of stupid to me when I first saw the trailer, but a couple of good reviews inspired me to go see it. Maybe I had too high expectations. Maybe you shouldn’t see horror films at 1:30 in the afternoon. But I was never really scared for any of the characters (the threat of death never seemed particularly imminent, even with the heavily tattooed Chris Hemway and the ominously PTSD’ed Timothy Olyphant glaring crazily at the camera) nor particularly invested in any of them. That might be a lie. I really liked Timothy Olyphant’s performance as the quasi-insane mountain man, ex-Marine Nick, and Kiele Sanchez as his girlfriend was pretty enigmatic and engaging.
To truly discuss my problems with A Perfect Getaway, I’ve got to throw up a huge SPOILER WARNING. In all the commercials, and most of the reviews, people can’t help but mention the huge, M. Night Shaymalan-esque “twist.” But at this point, and maybe between my Gender and Horror class and my natural Horror-loving nature, it didn’t really seem all that surprising.
The point of the movie is more or less to figure out who the killers are (we know they’re a man and woman pair, and we’ve met three different pairs), but the movie only really suggests two different options. By 1/3 of the way into the movie, the first possibility, Chris Hemway (And his incredibly, Kirk-daddy abs) and Marley Shelton are captured by the police, and it’s pretty damn obvious that they’ve been framed. Sure they have dread locks and weird facial hair, but they’re way too obvious. But to a large extent, that holds true for Olyphant and Sanchez. They’re weird, and outdoorsy, and slightly off balance, but it’s also way to easy that they just happen to be the killers and they just happen to be going on a trip with our main characters. By the time that Nick is bringing home dead deers (goats?) for his woman to lovingly gut, I was 100% positive they weren’t the killers.
So that leaves us with the big “twist.” Except… it didn’t feel twisty. They cast Steve Zahn, dude! Steve Zahn is a crazy chameleon of a character actor, and I didn’t for a second believe that they had cast him just to simper about how crazy their hiking partners were. On top of that, Milla Jojovich (the Resident Evil badass) seemed like one of the worst actresses of all time for the first half of the movie. I spent a lot of time thinking, “God I hope this is the twist, because she sucks.” And they waited way too long to start the killing, murdering part of the movie. So when Steve Zahn was suddenly all crazy eyed and surprisingly muscular in his tank top and started insisting on Olyphant’s accompanying him on their kayaking adventures, I knew exactly where this was going. Plus, and this isn’t to say “wow I’m so smart” but I found it really conspicuous that in the beginning wedding video we never saw the happy couple.
Either way. Although I can’t really fault a movie that’s as obsessed with half naked dudes as an episode of True Blood, and it’s beautifully shot and (with the exception of the showboating Jojovich) well acted, overall, it wasn’t the end of summer gem I was looking for. I went in expecting The Descent, I got instead a hiking The Talented Mr. Ripley.