In 1991, few thriller credentials carried more weight than “From the creator of Fatal Attraction.” Universal put it right on the poster for A Kiss Before Dying, and understandably so. James Dearden had written the 1987 smash, and for his feature directing debut he turned to Ira Levin’s Edgar Award-winning first novel, previously filmed in 1956. The ingredients were certainly there for another slick tale of sex, ambition and very bad decisions.

Dearden updates Levin’s story to the tail end of the greed-is-good era, which suits Jonathan Corliss (Matt Dillon, In & Out) just fine. As a boy, Jonathan watches Carlsson Copper trains rumble past his home and sees the kind of life he wants. By adulthood, wanting it isn’t enough. He intends to get inside.

His route is Dorothy Carlsson (Sean Young, No Way Out), daughter of copper magnate Thor Carlsson (Max von Sydow, The Exorcist).Dorothy thinks she’s in love. Jonathan sees a future with a very attractive balance sheet attached. When complications threaten the life he has already mapped out for himself, the movie shows just how far he’s willing to go to protect the plan. From there, Dorothy’s twin sister Ellen, also played by Young, begins asking questions of her own, and A Kiss Before Dying shifts from chilly character study into a cat-and-mouse thriller. Diane Ladd (Gigi & Nate) turns up as Jonathan’s mother, while James Russo plays Dan Corelli, an ex-cop working security for the Carlsson family. The cast is strong, but Dillon is the reason the movie works as long as it does.

River Phoenix and Kiefer Sutherland reportedly passed before Dillon landed the role, and Dearden later said Dillon should have been his first choice. It’s easy to see why. Jonathan doesn’t need to snarl or announce what he wants. He treats charm like another tool in the box, pulling it out whenever somebody stands between him and the life he thinks he deserves. For his part, Dillon is all charm, smiling like a man already counting someone else’s money.

The opening act is easily the movie’s strongest stretch, sleek and nasty in exactly the way you want an early-’90s thriller to be. Howard Shore’s score keeps tightening the screws while Dearden lets us understand Jonathan long before most of the people around him do. There are even a couple of fun movie-within-the-movie touches, with Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Hitchcock’s Vertigo flickering across television screens.

The problem comes once Ellen takes over as the audience’s way into the mystery. By then we know too much, and she knows far too little. The suspense stops being “Who did it?” and becomes “How long will it take her to figure out what we figured out ages ago?” Young had replaced Bridget Fonda, who would work opposite Dillon a year later in Singles, and the chemistry here never really catches fire. Young tends to be strongest when she can play sharp, wary or slightly dangerous herself, which makes Ellen’s slow realization especially frustrating. The romance between Ellen and Jonathan is meant to increase the tension, but too often it creates awkwardness instead.

The Razzies piled on, giving Young both Worst Actress and Worst Supporting Actress, which feels unnecessarily cruel. The larger problem isn’t really her performance. It’s that the screenplay needs Ellen to remain several steps behind the audience for too long.

Somewhere underneath all of this is a colder, meaner movie. The reshot ending, changed after poor test screenings, only adds to the sense that some of the nastier edges were sanded down before release. What remains is still an entertaining thriller, especially when Dillon is doing the smiling, but the movie spends the rest of its running time trying to catch up with how good its first act was. Another remake of this wouldn’t be a bad idea, giving another filmmaker the opportunity to truly take advantage of the darkness present in the source material.