***SPOILERS*** You see right away that their marriage is a bit strained within the first few minutes of the movie as Steven and Emily Taylor, Michael Douglas & Gwyneth Paltrow, get ready to attend a by invitation only art exhibit at the New York Museum of Art. At the museum Emily makes eye contact with young starving and soon to become famous, or so he hopes, young artist David Shaw, Viggo Mortensen. You knows right away that she and him have got something going between each other and that the cheated on husband Steven, who's nobody's fool, knows that as well.
Emily and David we find are madly in love with each other but Emily finds it much too hard to tell Steven and thus have the marriage dissolved. Keeping her affair with David secret Emily goes to his loft in Greenpoint Brooklyn every chance that she has and spends the day making out with him until Steven, a bond and currency broker on Wall Street, comes back home from a hard day's work at the office.
Giving David a call, he got his phone number at the exhibit, Steven invites him over to a downtown bar to talk over his art work. To David's surprise, when he and Steven go to his loft to check it out, he's hit with the fact that Steven not only knows what's going on between him and Emily but also knows that David is an impostor! It turns out that David is on the lamb from the police for fleecing a number of rich and naive women of their life savings. Having been already convicted and sentenced to long prison terms for fraud and embezzlement the third time around would put David away for at least 15 years with no chance of parole. On top of all that Steven got the self-styled Casanova by the you know what with a photo that identifies him as the person who gypped a woman out of her savings. This information that David has, if it lead lead to a trial and conviction, would be David's third strike as well as a 15 year sentence behind bars.
Just when you think that you got an idea of where the movie is going with Steven breaking up the love affair between the young artist and his wife Emily he completely surprises you by offering David $500,000.00 to not just get of of his and Emily's life but to murder her! We soon learn that Steven is not at all that interested in whom his wife is sleeping with but in her 100 million dollar trust fund that he's to inherited if anything bad, like Emily losing her life, happens to her.
Having been involved in a number of wild and very speculative trading ventures on Wall Street Steven's firm is about to go bust with him heavily leveraged in playing the currency and bond markets with the banks leaving him, the once billionaire Wall Street whiz kid, almost penniless.
The plan to do in Emily that Steven devises with a very reluctant David is to make it look like she was surprised by a burglar who then killed her and took of with nothing more then the key to her and Stevens suite that he would provide for him. David who's to do all the dirty work acting as the burglar while Steven, providing a perfect alibi for himself in his wife's murder, is away playing cards with his Wall Sreet friends on the other side of town. The almost perfect plan backfires when Emily not only survives it by killing the intruder, after a life and death struggle, with a oven thermometer but, this is what really blew Steven's as well as everyone watching the movies mind, the dead man turns out not to be David Shaw!
Very well done murder drama/thriller that has the slick and crafty Steven Taylor get outmaneuvered by the person whom he tries to manipulate David Shaw. David in no time at all has all the cards to put Steven not just out of business, as a Wall Street broker, but behind bars as well for attempted murder of his wife Emily. Emily for her part is completely ignorant of what Steven had planned for her. It's not until Emily realizes with the help of Turkish/American NYPD detective in charge of the killing Mohamed Karaman,David Suchet, that the key that's on her key-chain, that Steven hastily put on it, is actually that of the dead burglars, Roland Gibbs, Washington Heights apartment. Emily and Moe or Mohamed somehow secretly bond together during the rest of the movie "A Perfect Murder" with her knowing Turkish and speaking to Moe in his native language.
It takes a while for Emily to realize just what Steven is up to and by the time she finally get's it all together with the mystery of how her missing house key that the sparks and bullets really start to fly in the movies very tense and edge of your seat final sequence.
Emily and David we find are madly in love with each other but Emily finds it much too hard to tell Steven and thus have the marriage dissolved. Keeping her affair with David secret Emily goes to his loft in Greenpoint Brooklyn every chance that she has and spends the day making out with him until Steven, a bond and currency broker on Wall Street, comes back home from a hard day's work at the office.
Giving David a call, he got his phone number at the exhibit, Steven invites him over to a downtown bar to talk over his art work. To David's surprise, when he and Steven go to his loft to check it out, he's hit with the fact that Steven not only knows what's going on between him and Emily but also knows that David is an impostor! It turns out that David is on the lamb from the police for fleecing a number of rich and naive women of their life savings. Having been already convicted and sentenced to long prison terms for fraud and embezzlement the third time around would put David away for at least 15 years with no chance of parole. On top of all that Steven got the self-styled Casanova by the you know what with a photo that identifies him as the person who gypped a woman out of her savings. This information that David has, if it lead lead to a trial and conviction, would be David's third strike as well as a 15 year sentence behind bars.
Just when you think that you got an idea of where the movie is going with Steven breaking up the love affair between the young artist and his wife Emily he completely surprises you by offering David $500,000.00 to not just get of of his and Emily's life but to murder her! We soon learn that Steven is not at all that interested in whom his wife is sleeping with but in her 100 million dollar trust fund that he's to inherited if anything bad, like Emily losing her life, happens to her.
Having been involved in a number of wild and very speculative trading ventures on Wall Street Steven's firm is about to go bust with him heavily leveraged in playing the currency and bond markets with the banks leaving him, the once billionaire Wall Street whiz kid, almost penniless.
The plan to do in Emily that Steven devises with a very reluctant David is to make it look like she was surprised by a burglar who then killed her and took of with nothing more then the key to her and Stevens suite that he would provide for him. David who's to do all the dirty work acting as the burglar while Steven, providing a perfect alibi for himself in his wife's murder, is away playing cards with his Wall Sreet friends on the other side of town. The almost perfect plan backfires when Emily not only survives it by killing the intruder, after a life and death struggle, with a oven thermometer but, this is what really blew Steven's as well as everyone watching the movies mind, the dead man turns out not to be David Shaw!
Very well done murder drama/thriller that has the slick and crafty Steven Taylor get outmaneuvered by the person whom he tries to manipulate David Shaw. David in no time at all has all the cards to put Steven not just out of business, as a Wall Street broker, but behind bars as well for attempted murder of his wife Emily. Emily for her part is completely ignorant of what Steven had planned for her. It's not until Emily realizes with the help of Turkish/American NYPD detective in charge of the killing Mohamed Karaman,David Suchet, that the key that's on her key-chain, that Steven hastily put on it, is actually that of the dead burglars, Roland Gibbs, Washington Heights apartment. Emily and Moe or Mohamed somehow secretly bond together during the rest of the movie "A Perfect Murder" with her knowing Turkish and speaking to Moe in his native language.
It takes a while for Emily to realize just what Steven is up to and by the time she finally get's it all together with the mystery of how her missing house key that the sparks and bullets really start to fly in the movies very tense and edge of your seat final sequence.