"Nothing bad ever happens in Hawaii," one touristy character in A Perfect Getaway naïvely notes. Oh poi (sorry!), are they wrong! Terrible things happen in Hawaii all the time. You could be knifed right beside a beautiful seascape! Or someone might hunt you down and pull out all of your teeth and cut off all of your fingertips! Or Pearl Harbor! Or—worst of all—you could be a former supermodel named Milla Jovovich, and then you'd wake up one day to discover you're married to Steve Zahn!
When annoying, waspish, thirtysome-thing newlyweds Cliff (Zahn) and Cydney (Jovovich) decide to take their honeymoon in Hawaii, they also decide to backpack 11 miles to a remote beach. En route, they get slightly skeezed out by a hippie couple (Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth) who may or may not be psychopathic, and shortly after that, they get slightly turned on by a pair of Southern hotties (Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez) who're skinny dipping by a waterfall, and also may or may not be psychopathic. And also, totally coincidentally, it turns out that there are a couple of psychopaths who're hunting and killing newlyweds... on this very island.... Da da daaaaaaa! Suspense, action, and knifings follow.
When writer/director David Twohy (Pitch Black) finally amps up the heat halfway through A Perfect Getaway, he manages to take a ho-hum premise and turn it on its head, making for a fun romp through well-worn territory. Twohy's genre-referencing script is cheeky enough to know that audiences have seen a lot of couples getting terrorized by a lot of psychos over the years, and he slips in a few unforeseen twists and some funny red herrings. For a B movie, that's good enough—so score one for nothing bad happening in Hawaii.
98 min. | Rated R
Director: David Twohy
Writer: David Twohy
Producer: Robbie Brenner
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Timothy Olyphant, Marley Shelton, Steve Zahn, Kiele Sanchez, Katie Chonacas, Chris Hemsworth, Dale Dickey, Wendy Braun and Tory Kittles
RSSGoing to Seattle?
