A Perfect Getaway opens with a cliché I'd be happy to see die, a video montage of people at a wedding giving their well-wishes to the newlyweds Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich). Intercut with the video we catch up with the newlyweds on their Hawaiian honeymoon. Everything appears to be idyllic in this Pacific Eden until word gets out that there's a killer couple out there knocking people off. This information arrives around the same time Cliff and Cydney meet two couples, Kale and Cleo (Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton), two other newlyweds with an off-putting air about them, and Nick and Gina (Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez), a former special ops man's man and his handy-with-a-knife girlfriend.
Or are they? Or are anyone? Who's who? Who are you? You may not be sure after the movie's frustrating second act twist that twists the film so hard it nearly breaks it. Fortunately the movie's thrilling third act, fun performers and beautiful scenery make the endeavor, while far from perfect, certainly entertaining.
The only thing stopping me from giving it a wholehearted endorsement is that damn twist. Alfred Hitchcock laid down a lot of brilliant ideas about how to execute a good thriller. He came up with the MacGuffin. He famously said, "Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders." One of his most acknowledged truisms was that the filmmaker should never, ever lie to his audience. Characters could lie to other characters, directors could misdirect the audience, even fool them, but they should never, ever lie.
I went back and watched A Perfect Getaway a second time because I felt certain that it had lied to me with its twist. It hadn't, and I will give writer/director David Twohy credit for that, but it still felt like a lie. For the sake of one reveal Twohy lets the tail wag the dog for the first hour and change of his film, and instead of surprising the audience it just makes them feel jerked around.
The twist is also a bust in that it comes in the shape of a flashback that lasts nearly ten minutes and shows the audience a much more interesting movie than the one they've been watching for the last hour. As proof of this, the last twenty minutes are full of wild action, exciting reversals, and a handful of big, fun moments. Giving the audience the information at the beginning that Twohy hides away for two-thirds of the movie would open up the film to be both a fun cat-and-mouse game as well as a potentially fascinating character study. Instead, it's an hour of shell game, an explosion of exposition, and twenty minutes of thrills, spills and kills.
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