With Alien: Earth, Timothy Olyphant returns to the scene of the crime: FX, where he went from stealing scenes in uneven movies like The Girl Next Door or Gone in 60 Seconds to giving an unequivocally great leading performance in Justified, one of the best TV shows of its era. Since Justified ended (and was briefly revived), television has been the primary outlet for Olyphant’s laconic yet electric style. Sometimes he’ll pop up in a small role for a name-brand director like Quentin Tarantino or David O. Russell, but his strong reputation and steady work as a TV actor have seemingly allowed him to get a little choosier with film roles. That’s good for Olyphant but bad for movie fans, who get fewer opportunities to see the actor enliven a preposterous film like A Perfect Getaway, a little-seen thriller that deserves to be mentioned alongside his more prestigious work.
Little about this 2009 flop signals prestige. It was released in August, the dog days of the summer release calendar, just before Justified came along the following year and made Olyphant a household name. It was written and directed by David Twohy, who may be most recognizable as the other ‘90s-blockbuster-screenwriter-turned-director named David. In other words, he’s not David Koepp, who adapted 1993’s summer smash Jurassic Park; he’s the guy who adapted 1993’s summer smash The Fugitive. The majority of his directorial output stars Vin Diesel as Richard B. Riddick.
Don’t hold that against him. (Not least because the Riddick movies kick ass!) In fact, Twohy’s roots as a genre screenwriter serve A Perfect Getaway well. The movie follows Cliff (Steve Zahn) and Cydney (Milla Jovovich), a honeymooning couple on a complicated hike to a remote Hawaiian beach. Along the way, they meet Nick (Olyphant) and Gina (Kiele Sanchez), another couple. When Nick, a chatty type, hears that Cliff is a screenwriter, he starts telling him various yarns from his life, convinced his experiences would make for a ripping motion picture. Meanwhile, Cliff and Cydney grow suspicious of their new and unwanted travel buddies.
That’s about all anyone should know about the plot of A Perfect Getaway going in. The fun of the movie is getting to know these couples by eavesdropping on their half-chummy, half-uncomfortable interactions. On paper, a movie where the characters spend a decent amount of time jawing about screenwriting sounds insufferable. In practice, it’s precisely the movie’s screenwriter-brained silliness that all four actors key into. Zahn, so often the supporting goofball in movies like Out of Sight, That Thing You Do!, and War for the Planet of the Apes, shows some range playing a non-sidekick role. Jovovich is even better in one of her most unexpectedly range-y performances. She’s best known for her action-movie work with Paul W.S. Anderson, but within the confines of this pulpy thriller, she manages to prove herself as both a charming romantic lead and a serious dramatic actress.
The movie’s gem, though, is Olyphant. Around this time in his career, he had underwhelming turns as a killing-machine hero in the video game adaptation Hitman and the outright villain of Live Free or Die Hard. What those movies miss is how much fun it is to watch him play a character with the bones of a bad guy and the insouciant charm of, if not a hero, a charming rogue. In movies like Go and The Girl Next Door, he’s a menacing dirtbag who winds up nearly impossible to completely dislike. (He spends a large portion of both movies looking like he’s truly mulling over how much harm to cause the more sympathetic characters.) In Gone in 60 Seconds, he’s a perfect “good” bad guy: the cop who you hope doesn’t actually catch the thief heroes of the movie. Justified, meanwhile, perfectly cast him as a law enforcer who deserves a chewing out over his cowboy-like transgressions. Push him too far to one side or the other, and Olyphant starts to look bored.
A Perfect Getaway may exploit that quality better than any other movie, because Nick is the character who seems to be having the most fun. (In some of his more outright villainous roles, it’s Olyphant himself who’s clearly having fun, even if the character in question is glowering.) Nick seems genuinely tickled to meet Cliff and regale him with oddball stories. He regards his own loquaciousness with such relish that it’s easy to understand why Tarantino and an Elmore Leonard adaptation eventually came calling. The movie perfectly exploits the way Olyphant’s cowboy swagger — that squint, that gangly physicality — can turn unsettling when characters can’t tell whether he’s making friends, sizing them up, or calculating a threat assessment.
It would probably be a stretch to suggest that Olyphant’s Nick should have featured in some kind of Perfect Getaway spinoff or follow-up. Part of the movie’s old-fashioned August-release appeal is wrapped up in its single-watch, 98-minutes-and-out efficiency. It’s a great stand-alone ride. That said, the outsized nature of the stories Nick tells about himself does feel like a prompt for imagining further adventures; that’s exactly what happened with Riddick, a shadowy figure who emerged from Pitch Black to anchor the occasional sci-fi epic. It’s easy to imagine Olyphant’s Nick character striding into a bank heist, talking his way through a con game, or solving a locked-room mystery. Maybe that would ruin the purity of this clever-silly genre exercise. On the other hand, it might be just the kind of surprise a screenwriter would appreciate.
A Perfect Getaway is streaming on HBO Max.
