No other actor does Crazy Eyes like Timothy Olyphant. If you remember his smarmy turn as a porn producer in the underrated The Girl Next Door, or his tightly wound take on a Wild West sheriff on HBO's Deadwood, you know what I mean. He's handsome as hell, yes, but there's something about him that’ll get your knees knocking, and not in a good way, either.
Right when Olyphant arrives on screen in A Perfect Getaway, the movie shifts gears from a by-the-numbers, idiots-on-vacation scare flick yawnfest to something more weird and edgy. Turns out this is exactly how director David Twohy intended it – he’s OK with letting the audience be bored before gleefully blowing the story up into something entirely more satisfying.
The setup is nothing new, save the two terrific actors playing the leads. Cliff (Steve Zahn) is a Hollywood screenwriter on a Hawaiian honeymoon with his manically cheerful bride, Cydney (Milla Jovavich). On a three-day hike in paradise, they hear from passing tourists about a grisly murder in Honolulu, and rumors that the murderers may have come to their island. An uncomfortable encounter with a pair of hostile hippies (Marley Shelton, Chris Hemsworth) feels more than a little threatening, but when they join up with another hiking couple (Olyphant and Liele Sanchez), the paranoia builds further -- could they be the killers?
Even if you think you know how the plot's going to shake out (I guessed early on, and I was right), just watching Twohy at work is a joy. After directing the excellent horror-suspense films Pitch Black and Below, he hit the bad-movie wall going 80 with the awful Chronicles of Riddick. It looked as if Twohy was yet another director who found himself overwhelmed by a big budget and huge special effects, and if he didn’t watch it he’d end up more Renny Harlin than Sam Raimi.
But here, he's back with a tightly crafted script, a smaller budget and fewer actors, and the result is smart, funny, genuinely suspenseful and wickedly clever. At one point, while discussing the art of screenwriting, Olyphant tells Zahn, "You gotta get the details right, or else you're just making another craptastic movie."
So the bottom line: Don't let the dumb first five or ten minutes of A Perfect Getaway turn you off. That's just the director lulling you into believing you're in for another craptastic movie before he pulls the rug out from under you. Twohy got the details right, and provides one hell of a fun ride.