A Perfect Murder (1998)

Directed by Andrew Davis. Starring Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, Viggo Mortensen, David Suchet, Sarita Choudhury, Constance Towers. [R]

Slick but fruitless redo of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder. Douglas is the cold-hearted, jealous husband this time, driven to hire someone to kill his unfaithful wife (Paltrow) for him, but here’s the (contrived) twist: the man he hires is her lover (Mortensen). Professionally executed, but short on suspense and rooting interest; by making the wife as remote and unsympathetic as her spouse, and rubbing the viewer’s nose in her tawdry infidelity, one may as well hope for an ending as fatalistic as The Blair Witch Project. Meanwhile, with Douglas doing little more than a slight spin on the kind of character he’d payed to death by now (his job is even on Wall Street), and Mortensen supplying only the drabbest of stylistic touches to his sketchily-defined character, it’s Suchet, as the poised investigator probing the aftermath of the crime, who provides the only spark, but it’s too dim and too late. Plot holes abound, as is customary in these kinds of intricately-plotted thrillers, but they’re more glaring when the other parts of the movie fail to inspire rapt attention. Screenplay adaptation by Patrick Smith Kelly.

43/100