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.