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Review: "A Perfect Murder"

By KEVIN MAYNARD
June 8, 1998

Hitting theaters on the same day as the tremendously hyped The Truman Show, A Perfect Murder is a solid, suspenseful Hollywood thriller that succeeds as a modest surprise in this blockbuster summer season. Based on Frederick Knott's stage play Dial M for Murder and the subsequent 1953 Hitchcock film of the same name, director Andrew Davis' film actually improves upon the relic material.

The adaptation of the play wasn't Hitch at his classic best. Today, Dial M for Murder feels static and stagey (especially since it isn't shown in its original 3-D format) as it follows beautiful heiress Grace Kelly, whose has- been tennis star husband, Ray Milland, is trying to kill her. In the '90s take on the same story, blackhearted hubbie Stephen Taylor (Michael Douglas) also puts out a hit on his leggy, loaded wife, Emily (Gwyneth Paltrow), but this time the man he hires to do the job is none other than her sensitive artist lover (Viggo Mortensen). As the two men try to outwit each other in a deadly game of cat and mouse, Emily has to scramble to save her life.

Since the late '80s, Michael Douglas has made a career of playing professional American men on the verge of a mental breakdown, and in A Perfect Murder, he's at his venal best since his turn as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Though it's nice to see him break out of power-suit mode every once in a while, nobody does crafty capitalist evil better than Douglas, and he knows it: Several of his knowing smirks, especially when he's pretending to comfort his wife, are pitched right at the audience. At first, Paltrow appears to be playing just another variation of her role in Great Expectations, an upper-class bitch who elegantly wreaks havoc on bohemian starving artists. But, as it turns out, Emily is actually a good girl; she's the film's moral center—complete with a multilingual fluency that magically assures her safe passage at both the NYPD and Washington Heights. And though her character strains credibility, the actress does an appropriately stylish turn as the menaced damsel. Best of all is Viggo Mortensen, the chiseled, handsome weasel who browbeat Demi Moore as a sadistic, D.H. Lawrence-quoting drill sarge in G.I. Jane. Playing an equally repellent cad here, Mortensen has a great soft-spoken hiss. Even though his character is underdeveloped—particularly in the film's third act, during which we never really find out how he feels about Emily—he and Douglas play off each other with nasty bravado.

This is certainly director Davis' tightest film since The Fugitive, although it's nowhere near as thrilling. The plotting feels drawn out in some places, and the ending's a little limp. But while A Perfect Murder is far from perfect, it's a clever, diverting, and attractively- packaged time-filler that features two of the most hissable heavies of the year.


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