‘A Perfect Murder’--Through Slick and Sin

“Trashy but potent” is how dark prince of Wall Street Steven Taylor (Michael Douglas) describes the canvases of sexy, enigmatic artist David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen). “A Perfect Murder,” the film they inhabit, tries hard to live up to that description, but the effort is too much to sustain.

Handsomely mounted and richly melodramatic, “A Perfect Murder” benefits from the gift director Andrew Davis (“The Fugitive”) has for adding intelligence to pulp shockers. And being based on the play that became Alfred Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder” gives the film an impressive pedigree.

But in their zeal to “contemporize” that story, to drag it into the anything-goes ‘90s, the producers and screenwriter Patrick Smith Kelly have changed the moral balance of the picture in a way that hampers audience satisfaction. “A Perfect Murder” begins better than it ends, and the pleasures it offers turn out to be more of a transitory nature.

One of the treats of “A Perfect Murder” is the good, disreputable fun that’s been had in typecasting the film’s leads, starting with Douglas as the scheming commodities trader who asks questions like “What’s our exposure?” and is never ever happy with the answers.

Steven Taylor is essentially a juicy reprise of “Wall Street’s” Gordon Gekko for Douglas. In “Perfect Murder” he looks more powerfully reptilian than ever, with a trace of the undead Count Yorga, Vampire, thrown in for variety. Few actors are as well-suited for making these preposterously amoral captains of industry plausible, or have quite Douglas’ way with lines like “I’ve always thought ‘bludgeon’ has a spur of the moment sound.”

Mortensen, though less well known than Douglas, is similarly and expertly cast to type as a character not likely to be mistaken for Jimmy Stewart. Mortensen’s Shaw is a sexually charged artist with a studio in Brooklyn who allows paint to stain his hands but never the sheets of his rarely empty bed.

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What these two men have in common is a passion for Emily Bradford Taylor, the wife of one and the mistress of the other. A blond heiress with a hefty trust fund (Grace Kelly played the part in the Hitchcock version), Emily has the kind of job assisting the American ambassador to the United Nations that allows her to take extended amorous lunches at Shaw’s quintessentially bohemian studio.

When Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays the role with the appropriate aristocratic sheen, first came to notice with a galvanizing performance as a raw, unpredictable young woman in “Flesh and Bone,” it would have been difficult to predict her current incarnation as the studio’s favorite icy blond object of desire; the ways of Hollywood are murky indeed.

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Once again, as in “Great Expectations,” Paltrow in effect plays the virgin imprisoned in the tower, a poor little rich girl desperately in need of rescuing, though the ‘90s being what they are even virgins are more sexually active than they used to be.

“A Perfect Murder” begins with Emily in bed with David, desperately in love and starting to want to get out of her marriage. The question the film posits is how much does husband Steven know and, given that it’s inevitable that he find out, what’s he going to do about it.

“A Perfect Murder” looks great as photographed by Darius Wolski, and the spectacular Fifth Avenue apartment created by production designer Philip Rosenberg, art director Patricia Woodbridge and set decorator Debra Schutt on an 11,000-square-foot set in Jersey City will have New Yorkers weeping in envy. But the way the critical plot questions are resolved is acceptable but nowhere near as memorable.

For, paradoxically, once everyone’s cards are on the table the film’s tensions lessen, not increase. Partly it’s because the characters’ amorality becomes too predictable, and partly it’s because Paltrow’s character, the one we end up caring about most, is also the film’s least developed.

Emily does speak at least two foreign languages fluently (including Arabic with a somber detective played by David Suchet), and has aristocratic Constance Towers (in a far cry from the roles she played for Sam Fuller) for a mother. But she seems to have interested the filmmakers more as a construct than a character. When she tells a friend that she’s thinking of leaving Steven because “he has no real idea who I am,” it’s easier to sympathize with the in-the-dark husband than it should be.

* MPAA rating: R for violence, sexuality and language. Times guidelines: sexual encounters and acts of violence.

‘A Perfect Murder’

Michael Douglas: Steven Taylor

Gwyneth Paltrow: Emily Bradford Taylor

Viggo Mortensen: David Shaw

David Suchet: Mohamet Karaman

A Kopelson Entertainment production, released by Warner Bros. Director Andrew Davis. Producers Arnold Kopelson and Anne Kopelson, Christopher Mankiewicz, Peter MacGregor-Scott. Executive producer Stephen Brown. Screenplay by Patrick Smith Kelly, based upon the play “Dial M for Murder” by Frederick Knott. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski. Editor Dennis Virkler. Costumes Ellen Mirojnick. Music James Newton Howard. Production design Philip Rosenberg. Art director Patricia Woodbridge. Set decorator Debra Schutt. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.