COUPLES: RETREAT! Getaway is near-perfect

Don’t be fooled by the uninspired ads for A Perfect Getaway, which make it look like any other tourists-in-tropical-peril thriller. Fooling you is the filmmaker’s job, and it’s my pleasure to report that erratic genre specialist David Twohy — whose last film was the camp-tastic The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) — is up to the task.

The casting is especially shrewd. Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich both play nicely against type as adventurous, upwardly mobile newlyweds whose Hawaiian hiking honeymoon overlaps the predations of two his-’n’-hers serial killers, while Timothy Olyphant and Marley Shelton do even subtler work as another couple navigating the treacherous island trails. This second pair’s boisterousness and facility with all things wilderness-based (i.e. big knives) makes them seem a mite suspicious, and suffice it to say that Olyphant’s character — a refugee from US special ops who variously bills himself as “hard to kill” and an “American Jedi ” — is more than he seems.

But Twohy doesn’t show his cards too early. He keeps the quartet’s interplay tense and surprising, introducing potent notes of class tension that screw with our identification while still hitting all the requisite B-movie marks (including a delicatessen’s worth of red herrings). And, as in Pitch Black, the director shows some real visual flair, aided by Mark Plummer’s crystalline cinematography and Tracy Adams’ nifty editing. Lean, shapely and unafraid to follow through when the time comes, this is terrifically assured filmmaking from start to finish. And, I might add: what a finish.