A Perfect Murder (1998)

Director: Andrew Davis

Cast: Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, Viggo Mortensen, David Suchet

Have I Seen It Before: Feels like an appropriate enough movie to give one of those “I was a little rich boy” confessions. I probably saw it about three or four times during a cruise—you take me on a luxury boat, I’m still going to stay in the cabin and watch whatever movie is playing on TV—when I was fifteen.

Did I Like It: I just recently watch Dial M for Murder (1954) and knew that a remake—1998 being the strange year that we all just decided to re-make large swaths of Hitchcock’s library—of the movie was somewhere out there, and in the back of my memory.

Set aside your shot-for-shot remakes, and set aside your hollow-toned movie-of-the-weeks, if one was going to take the raw material that made up Hitchcock’s movies and try to truly re-make it, I don’t think I could have come up with a filmmaker more suited to the task than Andrew Davis. We can talk about The Fugitive (1993) for hours, and I would be more than thrilled to have that conversation, but he also managed to be the only director to get a real performance out of Steven Seagal not just once, but twice. If the world was prepared to engage in yet another questionable trend, the wisdom of bringing in Davis is clear.

And the movie mostly succeeds, thanks largely to his skill at crafting movie thrillers. No one is stupid. Everyone is right up against it. Indeed, it’s at least slightly interesting to think of this film as an inversion of Davis’ success with The Fugitive. There, the tension comes from a good man insisting he didn’t kill anyone. A Perfect Murder, the tension stems from people eager to kill those closest to them.

Is A Perfect Murder a great film? No? Does it measure up to its predecessor? Also, no. It comes from an era when—and from a studio who was particularly troubled by this phenomenon—every movie was made with an eye to avoid risk. It isn’t like that has changed in the years since, though. Now, the studios wouldn’t even give a wide release to a thriller with adult characters doing adult things, even if it spoon feeds us character development we may not have ultimately needed.

The Fugitive (1993)

Director: Andrew Davis

Cast: Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Sela Ward, Andreas Katsulas*

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: What’s not to like? The plot is a tightly-wound tension deliver device that were a hallmark of Davis’ action films in the 90s. In an era where plenty of TV shows from the 60s were being re-created for the big screen, this could have been a real chore to sit through, but it isn’t. If you have a problem with some of the light implausibilities, then action thrillers might not be your thing. It’s also a weird twist of Hollywood fate that Davis hasn’t made a dozen more films in the last thirty years that were unassailably big hits. The film is really that good.

But ;et’s look at that cast again. Throw in Joe Pantoliano, and Julianne Moore, and this thing fills out way beyond its perfectly cast two leads. Never mind that I just happened to watch The Living Daylights (1987) early today, so I’ve accidentally done a “surprise, Jeroen Krabbé ism’t your friend, he’s the bad guy” double-feature.

But let’s look at the two leads. Jones brings his magnetic minimalism to full bore here, and the film would suffer greatly if there was any point in time when Gerard would be an antagonist and not an adversary for Ford’s Dr. Richard Kimble. Ford himself is at the height of his movie star powers, equal parts charming and disarming, and never not inspiring every inch of sympathy he can from the audience, and all by fully using the occasionally smirking, occasionally frowning countenance that made him a household name. But more importantly than that, this is a visceral performance from Ford. Forgoing just the chase amidst Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade (which makes the parade sequence in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) look all the more like a typical latter-day Lucasfilm CGI-fest) but As Ford is tossed around, and forced through raging waters in his escape attempts, it’s hard to think that this will be the guy who will quickly spend about twenty years sleep-walking through every film to which he forgot to say no.