Very no-frills escapist filmmaking, director David Twohy must have been on a short leash following the disaster of The Chronicles of Riddick and abandoned his sci-fi roots for a more mainstream thriller with lots of beautiful people and a beautiful Hawaii locale. And for what it is, this whodunit storyline that tries to play around with genre conventions goes down easily enough. We’ve got two couples (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich and Kiele Sanchez and Timothy Olyphant) in Hawaii on vacation who cross paths as a couple of murders take place on the island they all came from. The murderers may or may not be following them… or may or may not be among them. It’s a fine hook. Unfortunately the film also commits a handful of cinematic crimes, not the least of which is congratulating itself via its own self-referential dialogue on its clever plot twists ahead. Twohy might as well have planted signs in the ground. Also the director doesn’t have faith in the audience to go with his twist, doubling back in the third act to try and reestablish characters in hopes of making some sense of his finale. In fact in the third act, things seem to veer off course completely as suddenly we see bulging muscles and characters acting differently than they had been all the way ‘til then and even on their own, presumably without an audience watching. It’s as if the cameraman himself is in on trying to trick us by only allowing us to see what he wants. It all comes off as a bit of a sham. Timothy Olyphant again gives you shades of darkness and humor and comes out best among the cast. I tend to like him in films… but most of the time the average material he’s working with just makes me want to go back and watch “Deadwood” again.
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