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FILM REVIEWS
"It's Easy to Root for the Killer in `Murder'"
Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, June 5, 1998
``A Perfect Murder'' is a slick evening's entertainment. But
there's nothing about this thriller to prevent it from soon
becoming enmeshed in the memory with others in which Michael
Douglas wears a starched collar and grits his teeth.
This time he is the villain and, by far, the most compelling
presence. Again, he plays a Very Powerful Man, genial and
smooth on the surface but with something clicking behind the
eyes that lets you know . . . uh-oh.
The uh-oh factor kicks in nicely in the movie's first moments, in
which the tension is thick though nothing overtly nasty is
happening. A young wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) comes home and
finds her middle- aged husband (Douglas) dressed and smiling
and ready to take her out. Soon he'll be trying to ``take her out''
in another way.
``A Perfect Murder,'' which opens today, is loosely based on
Frederick Knott's play ``Dial M for Murder,'' but it's far from a
remake of the 1954 Hitchcock thriller based on the same material.
Screenwriter Patrick Smith Kelly takes the story down a different
road, and director Andrew Davis (``The Fugitive'') gives it a
contemporary push. Forget the witty detective stuff and imagine a
pool of blood, brutal stabbings, wife-beating, gun shots.
Douglas plays a financier with two problems. His rich wife is
having a tawdry affair with a scuzzy artist (Viggo Mortensen),
and his fortune is about to get wiped out. Cold, pragmatic and
wiggy with anger, he decides to have his wife killed and inherit
her money.
As a villain, Douglas has appealing energy and resiliency that
make it easy to root for him. Paltrow also makes it easy to root
for him -- she plays the wife as a complete zero.
When we see Douglas and Paltrow together, the first thought is,
``Why is she with the old guy?'' Af ter 10 minutes, the thought
changes to ``Why is he with that drip?'' It can only be money.
Part of the problem is the role. Paltrow's character whines things
like, ``He has no interest in who I am!'' The wife also has to be a
bit of a sap -- her lover is, in fact, an ex- con and a fraud. But the
vacuity and that idiotic air of self-pity and self-absorption -- that's
Paltrow's doing.
``A Perfect Murder'' introduces a detective (David Suchet), then
switches gears so it's the wife investigating the husband. She
uncovers much of the truth, but Paltrow doesn't show the wife
growing with the knowledge. She remains a dud.
As the plot shifts and twists, Mortensen emerges as the better
match for Douglas. He plays the lover as a fellow who can't help
laughing under his breath at this bigshot.
It's a dangerous form of vanity -- he makes the mistake of not
taking the husband seriously just because he's slept with the
man's wife.
©1998 San Francisco Chronicle
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