There’s a killer on the loose, but the cast is already brain-dead — A Perfect Getaway opens Friday, August 7.

A Perfect Getaway

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Horror movie couples are so stupid. If you’re camping on a remote jungle island with a bug-eyed stranger given to saying things like “there’s no nerve endings in the brain” while flashing a big knife, your first instinct would be to run away. Not the sweetly naive pair in A Perfect Getaway, another rote Hollywood thriller that unwisely eschews playing with convention by adhering closely to the idiotic plot, wherein everyone acts as dumb as possible in order to lead the film to a climactic showdown.

The film follows newlyweds Cliff (Steve Zahn) and Cydney (Milla Jovovich) as they spend their honeymoon in Hawaii hiking in the countryside on a secluded island. From the beginning, the trip is bizarrely foreboding — Cliff and Cydney encounter a pair of evil, bucktoothed hitchhikers that threaten them; another group of dim-witted (blond, of course) hikers tells them, “Um, there’s, like, a killer on the loose or something,” that only seems to target newlyweds (what are the odds?).

Ignoring any rational sense of self-preservation, they decide to take off into the jungle anyway, where they encounter psychotic couple Nick (Timothy Olyphant) and Gina (Kiele Sanchez). Nick is an ex-U.S. Special Forces soldier with a metal plate in his head. Gina is a giggling southern weirdo proud to show off her abilities in gutting a captured warthog. As the couples makes its way to the beach, each begins to suspect the other of being the murderous pair prowling the island.

Anyone who has seen a number of Hollywood thrillers should see the twist coming from a mile away, one of those infuriating reveals that repeats half the film, complete with a plot explained by way of goofy pop psychology. Director David Twohy is hilariously earnest in dropping clues as to the true identities of the newlywed killers and though he engineers some decent scares, the movie descends into a wearisome punch-chase-punch drama in its last third. If A Perfect Getaway has any B-movie thrills, it’s in watching Olyphant’s unhinged performance as a soldier, psycho-hunter and knife-wielding super-ninja. As he repeatedly tells artiste nerd Zahn, “You’re a writer, I’m a Jedi.” Remember that the next time you’re thinking of hiking on a deserted island with a killer on the loose.