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FILM REVIEWS


"A Perfect Murder"
By Jim Byerley
Home Box Office Critic
June 5, 1998

Hollywood once again raids the classics closet by remaking Alfred Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER. It's completely unnecessary, but A PERFECT MURDER (Warner Bros.) is a sleek, painless-to-watch thriller.

Michael Douglas is perfectly cast in the smarmy Ray Milland part. Married to a very wealthy woman and with a business in the midst of a major nosedive, our villain decides to hire someone to bump off his beloved. Things, of course, go wildly astray between the detailed planning stage and the botched execution.

As the targeted Mrs., Gwyneth Paltrow is no Grace Kelly, but at least she is a blonde with some class. She's worth $100 million, give or take a mil, and is having a hot affair with sexy artist Viggo Mortensen.

A PERFECT MURDER does make some changes in the original's intricate plotting, which work well enough. For one thing, Grace certainly wouldn't have dreamed of fooling around on hubby Milland back in the '50s, though "good friend" Bob Cummings was always lurking about. There are two other major departures from the 1954 film. A PERFECT MURDER was not shot in 3-D, and the murder weapon has been changed from a pair of scissors to a meat thermometer. Direction by Andrew Davis is quite serviceable, but lacks the nail-biting tension he achieved in THE FUGITIVE. One of the policemen investigating the Fifth Avenue murder enviously quips, "The rich are different from you and me." Duh, Sherlock.

The living quarters are truly fabulous here and often upstage the plot. The principals have a nifty art-filled place that is just slightly smaller than the Trump palazzo, but decorated with much more taste. Even the starving artist has a studio the size of Rhode Island. Hey, I'd kill Gwyneth for her mammoth, live-in kitchen. DIAL M FOR MURDER has never been considered among Hitchcock's masterpieces, but it is still preferable to this soulless Architectural Digest makeover.


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