David Suchet

Wall Street titan Steven Taylor seems like a devoted husband. He isn't. Beautiful Emily Bradford Taylor seems like a faithful wife. She isn't. And when Steven hires Emily's lover to kill her, it seems like A Perfect Murder. It isn't. In fact, little is what it seems in this sleek thriller. Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow and Viggo Mortensen star in A Perfect Murder, inspired by the play Dial M For Murder, filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954. Fans of that classic will be in for a lot of surprises. So will Steven. At each unexpected twist in his "perfect" plot, he improvises brilliantly.

Steven Seagal gets killed during the first 20 minutes of this enjoyable thriller, so the movie scores points for ingenuity because it immediately improves when you realize that Seagal's role is just a heroic cameo. That leaves Kurt Russell to star as an American intelligence expert who (due to Seagal's untimely demise) finds himself leading a strike force against Islamic terrorists who have seized in-flight control of a 747 jetliner with 400 passengers.