A Perfect Murder
An angry little thriller that works well not really as art, but works fantastically as a crackling little piece of entertainment. Gwyneth Paltrow stars as the trophy wife of yuppie jerk Michael Douglas, a businessman who's money is slowly falling away from him. Paltrow's character is cheating with a starving artist, played nicely by Viggo Mortensen.
Soon, the triangle begins to become coldly, deathly aware of each other's presence.
Douglas offers Mortensen's artist half a million dollars to kill Paltrow, and that sets the chain of events, of twists, of turns and double crosses, into motion. A Perfect Murder is wonderfully acted, incredibly mean, and always entertaining.
Shot and edited very well, I haven't quite seen a movie that flys by as quickly as this one; we are spared any bit of excess and only given what's absolutely neccessary by director Andrew Davis.
A Perfect Murder, to be frank, is one of those films where you can't even get up to go to the bathroom, even after drinking one of those tanker size cups of Soda.("I don't care about my bladder, can't miss the plot!") Anyways, A Perfect Murder is giddy fun, a wild, twisting thriller that I never found dull for a second. There is a sense of thrilling menace in every scene; and the tension didn't stop for a minute. The visuals are smart, and the acting is one step ahead- Michael Douglas plays this role much better than the bland tycoon in "The Game". Paltrow smartly plays her character as naive on top, cold and smart inside. Mortensen plays a character not fully drawn out, but the back and forth between Douglas and Paltrow is, for the most part, excitingly witty and smart. A Perfect Murder may not be grand art, but it is exciting and witty fun; greatly entertaining.
3 1/2 stars.