I wish director David Twohy worked a little more often. Then again, I wish he had taken a little more time and care with A Perfect Getaway, his first movie post-Riddick.
As a hired gun screenwriter, Twohy has some fun genre titles behind his name (Warlock, Waterworld) and had a hand in Harrison Ford's Fugitive update, which was certainly one of the most entertaining movies of the 90's and remains a bright spot in Ford's post-Indy career slide into safe middle-of-the-road bullshit territory. As a director, he hasn't worked quite as much, or perhaps had the opportunities that other directors have had, but nevertheless managed to carve out an honest-to-goodness Original IP franchise in the Pitch Black-Riddick movies. This is no small feat when you consider risk-averse Hollywood and their hopeless addiction to recycled material, mined from shallow, proven ground.
Pitch Black, a simple sci-fi story of low key and budget, with a cast picked from the bottom of the deck, was the film that introduced audiences to Riddick. As played by the rising Vin Diesel, the Riddick character acted as a proof-of-concept for Diesels abilities as an action vehicle driver (which he somehow squandered) and gave Twohy a minor hit and some buzz. Pitch Black was counter-programming to the typical multiplex fare, with a cool concept executed simply.It didn't claim to be an "event" and arrived with little hype. It felt like a throwback to a time when Hollywood made competent genre fare devoid of the synergistic genuflection that we see today.
Somehow Twohy was allowed to expand the Riddick universe with a sequel, nay a chronicle and took everything about the Riddick character and the vague world he existed in and blew it up to space opera proportions. The Chronicles of Riddick is more fun than all three of Lucas' legacy-destroying Star Wars prequels put together and I think, stands as one of the best sci-fi popcorn movies of the 00's. I wanted more Chronicles bad and I was hungry for more genre morsels from Twohy, who seemed to really get it while the Len Wiseman's of the multiplexes seemed to be pissing in my eye.
After a long wait and a few false Riddick starts, along comes A Perfect Getaway, and you can forgive me for being a little too excited. A thriller featuring 3 couples on a Hawaii vacation, the premise seems to promise a partner-swapping romp beneath the sun. *Spoiler Alert* there is no partner-swapping and this is the first of a few missteps the film takes.
The bare bones plot finds newly-weds Milla Jovavich and Steve Zahn on a honeymoon hike in beautiful Hawaii. After crossing paths with two other couples on the path, they get word of a girl-boy murder duo who are hacking their way across the island killing, wait for it...newly-weds. At this point the audience is supposed to be engaged in some serious who-dunnit calculations in their head, or more precisely, who's-doing-it. The personality makeup of the three couples goes like this: JovoZahn-annoyingly in love city slickers. Couple #2 (Timothy Olyphant & Kiele Sanchez) - Outdoorsey, possible psychopaths. Couple #3 (Mary Shelton & Chris Hemsworth) - smelly hippies, possible psychopaths. With the character arithmetic written out like that, it doesn't seem hard to come up with the answer to the riddle and that is the films biggest weakness. It's second biggest flaw is not delivering on its very clever 2-word descriptor for Timothy Olyphant's shifty character, one half of Couple #2.
With the film steaming along toward the big reveal of the killers identity, Twohy's script heavily telegraphs a twist in the tracks and tries a little too hard to throw the audience off by locking the character duos into the separate box cars he's created for them. So brilliantly coloured are the scales of the red herrings in this film that they have the opposite effect than intended, leading the viewer directly to the answer, instead of deflecting them away.
When JovoZahn meet Olyphant's Nick, he's a vaguely creepy hiker who talks a little too much about his violent escapades across the globe as a top secret super soldier, and proceeds to act as if everybody can catch flying hatchets tossed at their heads or stalk animals through the bush with a bow and arrow. In fact, when he returns to the group with a dead, bleeding goat slung over his shoulders and tosses it down for his sexy better half (Sanchez) to begin preparing for dinner, I was left with no more doubts as to whether Couple #2 were our murderers. As Sanchez sinks her knife into the carcass and pulls out the "gutbag" while chipperly prattling on to her aghast audience, it became all too clear what Twohy wanted me to think. He was pushing my buttons just a little too hard. And all the deflective character moments are like this, with Couple #2 acting far too knife-happy and loopy, and Couple #3 overflowing with way too much hostility, and JovoZahn acting far too ill-equipped throughout. When the twist comes, the audience has already been traveling on an unintended straight path toward it.
When the twist is unnecessarily explained in an extended 20 minute flashback (entirely filtered in a cool blue hue so as not to confuse the slower members of the audience) it only serves to highlight the gimmicky plotting. You realize that if Twohy hasn't exactly been out-and-out cheating, showing us private moments between the couples that don't add up to the sum, it's pretty close.
My next, and perhaps bigger issue with the film is what I mentioned previously, that Twohy fails to capitalize on the promise of Olyphant's character. Early on, after politely listening to Nick's stories of exploded landmines and gun fights, JovoZahn pointedly ask him what it is exactly that he does for a living. He replies, "I'm a goddamn American Jedi". Brilliant! Those two words economically tell us all we need to know about Nick. If he's the killer than we have to take him on his own word that he's "hard to kill". If he's not the killer, than the real killers are going to find him "hard to kill". Awesome! Now we're cooking with gas.
Olyphant is one of the best character actors around and I pretty much see whatever he's in no matter how shitty it is (see Hitman). He's handsome, but doesn't quite possess leading-man looks which kinda fucks him in his career but ideally suits him for left-field heroes or oddball villains. Look no further than his straight-backed performance in the brilliant Deadwood to see what kind of interesting territory Olyphant can carve out for himself with great material, or even with so-so material, as is the case with his hilariously annoyed villain in Die Hard 4. Needless to say, I was pumped to know that Olyphant would be illustrating just what an "American Jedi" means once the shit hit the fan in the third act.
Except he doesn't, or rather the script doesn't allow him to. His skills are hinted at throughout, but once the hammer drops on the action I was pretty disappointed in the results. After enduring that protracted exposition flashback, I was expecting to be rewarded with an American Jedi bringing all his training to bear, stalking his prey. But the climactic action sequence is very brief and seems to fizzle out before it begins.
I guess I'm being a little hard on Twohy and his perfectly serviceable thriller, and perhaps I was one of the very few who was eagerly awaiting his next project and therefore bringing some modicum of expectation to the film. But, his unexpected gift to nerds that was Riddick, built me up for something a little more special than A Perfect Getaway ends up being. My gripes about plotting and the absence of Jedi's aside, this is a totally fun Friday night rental. It's just that if I had've supported it opening weekend at the theatres like I had planned, I would've walked away even more bummed and stung by the broken promise of an American Jedi serving up hot death in paradise.
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