Recessions are a good time for certain film sub-genres that might almost be designed to make people feel better about having less money.

One of the more successful of the past few years is built around holidays that go horribly, violently wrong. Attractive, youngish people, usually in a group of four or five, go somewhere exotic only to be sacrificed by native Mayans, eaten by snakes, harvested for their organs or tortured for the sexual delight of Eastern European perverts. In A Perfect Getaway, a honeymoon couple on a hiking trip is stalked by a pair of serial killers.

This lean, muscular and at times surprising thriller, with some darkly humourous moments, was clearly inspired by a trekking holiday on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Watching it you can almost feel writer-director David Twohy (screenwriter of The Fugitive and director of Pitch Black) thinking: “This place is cool — how can I construct a thriller around a trip like this?”

He came up with a plot about upper middle-class newlyweds (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich) on a trek who are told that a pair of murderers are on the loose in Hawaii, and who suspect that they might have already encountered them on the trail.

The killers might be those tatooed, white-trash hitchhikers whom they refused to give a lift to back on the road (Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth), or they could be the friendly, sexy but nevertheless creepy Southern couple (Timothy Olyphant and newcomer Kiele Sanchez) they saw skinny-dipping at a waterfall. The further that soft, citified Cliff and Cydney go into the rainforest, the more vulnerable they become.

for a moment you wonder if you're watching a spoof

About two thirds of the way through the film there is a big, clever twist worthy of M Night Shyamalan. There is also some cunning play with home video footage — at first you think you are getting the usual Blair Witch Project/Cloverfield treatment, but you’re not — and some interesting use of split screens.

Unfortunately, some of Twohy’s screenwriting is not worthy of the twist or the technical inventiveness. Indeed, it is sometimes marred by crude signalling and clunky exposition.

At one point near the beginning, the yuppie honeymoon couple pull up to a shop on Kauai and their jeep wheel runs over a newspaper. As they drive off the camera zooms into the paper to reveal a headline about a pair of murderers on the loose targeting honeymoon couples. For a moment, you wonder if you are watching a spoof.

However, the big, clever twist, when it comes, makes you forget the banality of moments like this. And once it has happened the film becomes more of a straight-up action flick. The problem then is that too often you do not know quite enough about the characters, good or bad, to really care what happens to them. The fact that the film works is largely down to the powerful screen presence of Olyphant (previously seen in Go and Deadwood) who is a master at projecting simultaneous charm and menace.

He and Sanchez are a triumph of casting. Jovovich and Zahn are not — they are barely believable as a couple partly because it is hard to imagine a scenario in which Zahn would ever be in Jovovich’s league.
Interestingly, Jovovich has now developed a convincing American accent, though she seems to have lost much of the sexy glamour that she radiated as recently as the last Resident Evil film.

At one point one of the characters in A Perfect Getaway says: “You got to get the details right or you’re making another craptastic movie.” It makes it all the more surprising that the man who wrote that line then gets so many details wrong as both writer and director. These range from backpacks that are obviously not heavy, to Olyphant’s special-forces guy’s reference to the “4th Infantry Division” taking Baghdad, when it was the 3rd Infantry Division, as a three-second internet search would have revealed.

It is a shame because even though the film is a perfectly adequate summertime “B” thriller, you can sense how good it could have been with a bit more effort and attention.

One thing that cannot be faulted, however, is the gorgeous scenery, and perhaps the problem with shooting a film in paradise is that you stop caring enough about the final product.