Pretty Good is Pretty Good! In Praise of the Non-Masterpiece: A Perfect Getaway (2009, dir. David Twohy, US) by Matt Olsen

Because (increasingly) the entire recorded history of film is available for anyone to consume at any moment, it’s sometimes tempting for me to spend my movie/time budget ticking boxes from the still daunting list of critically-lauded tippy-toppers in preference to those somewhat lesser-thans. The operating thesis, as I see it, seems to be that if there is a limited amount of time in one’s life, then why waste even an hour and a half on anything other than the best? Especially when there is still so much “best” out there! It’s a marginally defensible argument as far as it goes but omits the vast majority of normal good films produced over the last hundred plus years.

I’ve spelled it out not to convince the reader – rational people aren’t typically troubled by this – but as a way of reminding myself not to fetishize perfection and, as is significant to this blog, to find a rubric under which to highlight a few recent to relatively-recent films that I think are well worth watching even if they are unlikely to find inclusion in the Best Movies of All Time Pantheon of Halls of Fame.

The writer/director David Twohy has had a fairly steady career in Hollywood over the last thirty-five years, beginning inauspiciously enough in 1988 with the screenplay to Critters 2: The Main Course.  Only five years later, however, he’d co-written one of the most successful films of all time, 1993’s The Fugitive. That’s a pretty big leap forward! True, the next few big budget scripts bearing his name couldn’t quite match that success: Terminal Velocity, Waterworld, and GI Jane. Though at least two of those are still talked/slapped about to this day. 

In between, he managed to direct two science fiction features based on his own scripts: 1991’s Grand Tour: Disaster in Time and 1996’s The Arrival. Despite some admittedly lackadaisical efforts, I haven’t been able to see Grand Tour. I did see The Arrival when it was released and my memory was that it was decidedly not absolutely terrible. 

It was in 2000 that he made probably his best-known feature as a director, the efficient and solid science-fiction thriller, Pitch Black, starring Vin Diesel as Riddick, who would become the subject of at least two much less strongly recommended sequels. (The first of these was followed by 2002’s submarine action horror mystery, Below, which I also haven’t seen but was co-written with Darren Aronofsky, perhaps interestingly.)

The film which I want to discuss, in the space remaining, is what I consider to be Twohy’s best and most entertaining: A Perfect Getaway from 2009. 

Said briefly, this is a high-octane, suspense thriller of suspicion and fear amongst tourists in Hawaii. What makes the movie work, and I contend that it very much does, is a steady pace, intriguing location, and an able set of actors. (This trilogy of factors for success will appear again in later posts.) The cast – led primarily by Steve Zahn, Milla Jovovich, Timothy Olyphant, and Kiele Sanchez with supporting roles from Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth – is uniformly good. The overall “fun first” tenor of the film allows them to chew into characters who are just slightly more exaggerated than a more serious-minded movie might typically bear. 

Zahn and Jovovich play slightly uptight honeymooners hiking a remote trail across what must be the most stunningly beautiful part of the Hawaiian Islands. (The location does a lot of work in this movie.) In due course, the newlyweds encounter the other couples and an unnerving paranoia sets in. It’s a lean plot that nevertheless matches the winding complexity of the trails these six characters navigate. 

Like any effective suspense film, the story keeps its secrets close, dropping just enough hints and whispers to maintain interest and a plausible uncertainty. The script serves prompts, feints, and ambiguities throughout successfully leaving the viewer in the same state of anxiety as the strangers onscreen. It’s possible, I suppose, for an audience member to outsmart the movie but if that’s why you’re watching, what are you doing? You have a weird idea of a good time. 

A Perfect Getaway isn’t a perfect movie – some of the self-referential stuff comes off as a little too cute in 2022 – but it’s a well-executed, tight ninety minutes of decidedly not dumb fun with a satisfying ending for anyone who wants that. Which should be everyone.

Matt Olsen is a largely unemployed part-time writer and even more part-time commercial actor living once again in Seattle after escaping from Los Angeles like Kurt Russell in that movie about the guy who escapes from Los Angeles.