Partially a comedically inflected Agatha Christie conceit, and partially a money-grubbing farcical ensemble along the lines of Death at a Funeral or Daddy’s Dyin’ and Who’s Got the Will, British import Twelve in a Box is wholly a dreadful bore.

Written and directed by John McKenzie (Vol-au-vent), the movie brings together a dozen strangers for a school reunion lunch at a remote country estate. Once there, their host appears via videotape and offers them one million pounds sterling apiece if they can coexist on the grounds for 96 hours without anyone leaving. After a bit of arm-turning, an all-in democratic vote establishes everyone’s acquiescence and confirms the parameters of the contest, but from the start there are social frictions, and things only get more complicated when the eldest member of the group suffers a heart attack and dies. Throw in some standard-grade personal carping, a pair of would-be burglers, a staircase accident and an eventual visit by the police, and you have all the familiar ingredients for a souffle that doesn’t rise.

The explanation for this particular group of men and women — some classmates, many not — isn’t necessarily convincing (everyone who visited the school’s web site was logged, the eccentric benefactor explains, and he chose a dozen names at random), but Twelve in a Box stalls almost from the start owing chiefly to the fact that its characters are poorly delineated, and just not very interesting. The pacing is interminable, the banter not nearly as cute or witty as its makers fancy, and the nature and quality of the performances unsteady. Throw in pedestrian filmmaking, editing that doesn’t help whip the supposedly escalating narrative up into a dizzy tizzy, and the fact that the entire enterprise isn’t helped much by the fact that the movie features only one inarguable babe (that’d be Phoebe Sweeney), and the end result is grating, start to finish. Some of the plot twists are entirely expected (sexual dalliances, both attempted and realized), but an imaginative mind will easily outstrip the forced zaniness on display here. (Masses Entertainment, unrated, 93 minutes)

Unabashedly streamlined genre flicks get a bad rap — with critical indifference often seemingly being the best for which they can hope — because they’re so frequently made by hacks, or at least passed off to inexperienced filmmakers in the form of a less-than-totally-polished script. Writer-director David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway, though, is a structurally solid B-movie, marked by smart casting and carefully modulated performances, that delivers high on the popcorn-munching entertainment scale.

The story revolves around newlyweds Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich), who are honeymooning in Hawaii when they stumble across backpacking hippie couple Kale and Cleo (Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton) and, just a bit later, Nick (Timothy Olyphant) and Gina (Kiele Sanchez), an ex-special ops soldier and Southern debutante turned bad girl. With news of a gruesome murder on the main island, and word that authorities are looking for both a man and woman as suspects, Cliff and Cydney become understandably paranoid about their new acquaintances. Pig-hunting trips deep into the woods and stories of Nick’s past escapades and metal-plate-reinforced head don’t do much to quell Cliff and Cydney’s fears.

Oh, and did I mention that Cliff is a Hollywood screenwriter, so he starts trying gain the psychological upper hand on Nick by stringing him along, and making him think that there might be a potential movie to be written based on his life? The introduction of such a winking, Scream-like deconstructive element — scrupulously avoided in the movie’s marketing campaign — has the danger of making A Perfect Getaway collapse under the weight of its own smug self-satisfaction, but Twohy is such a deft juggler of form and entertainment, artifice and colorful flourish, that he pulls it off with aplomb.

Then there’s the casting. I’ve written before about how Olyphant oozes charisma, displays
crackerjack timing and knows how to sharpen a casual throwaway line into a dagger
with pointed subtext, and he again brings to bear all those qualities
in A Perfect Getaway, dancing merrily along a razor’s edge in
crafting a character who comes as equal parts affable, unhinged,
contrarian and dangerous. Zahn and Jovovich are smartly cast, too, and do a great job bringing their characters’ awkwardness and vulnerabilities to the surface in small ways.

Those with a working knowledge of the thriller genre and the stakes of identity reversal will perhaps gauge where this is all headed, but Twohy (Pitch Black), not unlike John Dahl (Red Rock West, Joy Ride), has a superb grasp of structure, combined with the knowledge of how and when to integrate specific, telling details — be it in the mocking of Nicolas Cage, the inclusion of a deeply personal story from Cydney, or a slippery, unforeseen moment of violence that results in what may most charitably be described as the world’s worst between-fingers paper cut — that elevate the material, and give it some bite, and punch. A Perfect Getaway isn’t perfect; post-twist, it enters a weird slipstream that plays out too long in flashback. But it’s effective even when you feel the strings being pulled because it makes you care about and have interest in its characters, and then ponder the changes in your degrees of relatability when those investments dip and swirl. As such, Twohy’s film slots alongside something like Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown as a fun, engaging exercise in marionette cinema. “Use me so good,” you’ll likely be saying. (Rogue, R, 98 minutes)