What would we do without the twist ending? Well, for one, watch a lot fewer bad movies. Does that describe last year's Hawaiian honeymoon in hell thriller? I...think so.
My hesitation comes from the fact that the twist in question is actually pretty good. The problem is everything around it. For starters, director David Twohy's tone is a bit off-kilter throughout. Some forced humor here, some way played out self-referential movie insider talk there. All of it unnecessary and distracting to the central tension, which isn't bad at all and greatly enhanced by a strong cast including Milla Jovovich (actually underused here), Steve Zahn, Timothy Olyphant (who is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors), and relative unknown Kiele Sanchez.
But the lethal blow for this film comes the moment after the big reveal. Rather than using the momentum to play out the climax, they inexplicably embark on a completely superfluous 20 minute backstory of the major characters. In black and white no less (actually, blue and white--is that more or less pretentious?). Without giving anything away, here's the premise: three couples hiking along a remote path; one couple are serial killers. That's not exactly screaming for SparkNotes, is it? (And if it were, they would be written in crayon on the back of a Steak 'n Shake menu.)
Honestly, it just comes down to poor filmmaking, a bit of a surprise since Twohy's 2000 Pitch Black was a very good and original film and probably one of the top science fiction movies of the decade. Then again, it also gave us 10 years of Vin Diesel. And counting.
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