Review of A Perfect Getaway (2009) by Mikemike — 09 Aug 2009

Spoiler Alert.... Spoiler Alert.... Spoiler Alert.... Wow, the first 11 user votes have got to be from shills. Add to that Roger Ebert who says the film "only seems to cheat". What?!?! Is he an independant critic or a paid advertisement? He is smarter than that.

.. This film is the very example of cheating. Similar to overuse of the "dream sequence", where the audience is suckered into believing some incredible plot line only to find out it was all a dream, this movie feeds you hook line and sinker with no possible misreading or "other explanation" behind the reveal.

By complete trickery we are lead to believe that the actual killers could not POSSIBLY be the actual killers. The only way to justify this trickery is for us as the audience to understand, unequivocally, from the beginning, that the whole movie is a play on itself.

In my opinion we are unaware until the tricks are revealed. Which means that the movie completely relies on trickery. We catch a few quirky clues early on like the red snapper joke and some references to screen writing, but that is not enough for us to understand that the whole thing is a farce.

This could have been a great movie if presented as farce. IMO the farce isn't completely revealed until the lead realizes his hands are so mangled he can't hold a gun. Now that's funny.

Why not clue us in on that early enough that it gets a good laugh instead of a huge sigh? Then we find out that the killers were putting on a great act. That's fine. But we the viewers, from the omniscient point of view we are given, should have known it was an act.

Instead we were deliberately tricked. Omniscience and trickery are mutually exclusive. If we see everything then we can't be tricked. But we are. We are deliberately shown some things that are not true.

It is OK to mislead the audience by selectively showing or not showing certain elements, but when the omniscient viewer sees something that is patently false in order to trick him/her...this is bad storytelling.

This type of trickery is a textbook no-no and for good reason. This is an insult to the reader/viewer and must be done with great care. There is no care here in my opinion, only insult. I give the 3 just for the scenery which is beautiful.

The rest is a disaster.