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A perfect mess >> The ultimate crime made banal in A Perfect Murder by MATTHEW HAYS
Director Andrew Davis has tried to up the ante here. In the original film, Ray Milland sets out to have his wife (Grace Kelly) offed after learning of her extramarital dalliances. In the '90s version, Michael Douglas actually hires his wife's lover to kill her. The twist sounds deliciously sleazy, but Davis handles the action in such a dreary, uninspired and standard fashion as to deaden any excitement this film might have had. Perhaps the principal problem here is the cast. Paltrow does her best, but Douglas is all wrong. If there was one thing Hitchcock understood (and there were many), it was the power of casting against type. Take a wholesome fella like James Stewart, renowned for playing western heroes and idealistic Frank Capra characters, set him up as a twisted voyeur in a film like Vertigo, and double the audience's surprise and anxiety. Douglas, on the other hand, is entirely expected in the role of a duplicitous bucket of slime capable of murder. Davis doesn't seem to realize this is the same man who played a wife-stalking vigilante in Falling Down, a morally-questionable adulterer in Fatal Attraction, a sick-in-the-head cop in Basic Instinct--among other roles. Couple that with audience knowledge of Douglas's offscreen character (the actor acknowledged seeking treatment for an ailment called "sex addiction" in the '80s), and when he says or does something nasty all anyone can do is yawn. Then there's the script, which allows us to know everything that Paltrow doesn't know and can't figure out throughout the entire film. By my count, there's one jolt in this film, as a character gets stabbed--an effect created through rapid editing rather than actual suspense maintained by a thoughtful script or characters anyone would ever care about. Davis, for his part, cannot be felt anywhere in this movie. There's no style, no depth, little or no apparent thought to this mess. There's been plenty of pretentious talk of how the recent spate of remakes is indicative of the end of new ideas at the end of the millennium (or something like that). Nonsense. Hollywood studios are reaching into the remake bag because they think if they reuse ideas which have worked before, their chances for bountiful cash returns are greater. They certainly don't stand to make much money at all if A Perfect Murder is the best they can do. A Perfect Murder opens Friday, June 5
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Talk about asking for trouble: when news came down the pipes that Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow were to star in a studio-backed remake of Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder, groans were heard 'round the world. Here it is, and it's as bad as collective moviegoers could have imagined. Still, if there's something nice to say about this movie, it's that it makes you appreciate just how great Hitchcock was.