Dangereuse séduction

In New York, the investigative reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry) sees her scoop about a gay senator spiked by her editor. She quits her job in the newspaper and meets with her childhood friend Grace (Nicki Aycox) by chance in the subway. Grace tells Ro that she had just been dumped by the powerful and wealthy owner of the greatest New Yorker advertising agency, Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), and she was threatening to tell his wife about their affair. When Grace is found dead, Harrison becomes Rowena's prime suspect. With the support of her hacker friend and former colleague Miles Haley (Giovanni Ribisi), Ro is hired for a temporary work in Harrison's agency to get close to the executive and investigate his life.

"Perfect Stranger" has a good story, with a surprising twist; the lead cast has the names of Halle Berry, Bruce Willis and Giovanni Ribisi; unfortunately, the screenplay does not work well since it does not create an empathy of the viewer with the characters, which have dirty secrets. In the end, this film is a good and forgettable entertainment. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Estranha Perfeita" ("The Perfect Stranger")

Unlike many of the reviewers on here, I quite liked the main body of the film. I love murder mysteries, suspense, whodunits, so it's always nice when a big budget mystery comes out.

TV mysteries are always the best, Agatha Christie penned mysteries are definitely the best, you are given clues, taken up blind alleys, but if you're smart, you can work out the puzzle. The problem with Perfect Stranger, is that the ending feels like it was tagged on because nobody was smart enough to come up with an intelligent, logical conclusion, that actually made sense. I felt robbed by the twist, the whole conclusion made absolutely no sense. The closing twenty minutes almost made me feel like I'd switched channels, which is a shame, because the build up was really smart, I enjoyed the tension, I liked the way the story was going, the eye pictures, drops etc, it was clever, then we get the rug pulled from underneath our feet.

Halle Berry did a great job, Bruce Willis was also very good, in a very different role for him. Disheartening, but with the likes of Gone Girl and Girl on a Train the genre is still alive.

Watchable, 6/10

After viewing Perfect Stranger, I went on the film's page at the IMDb, and found out that there were three different endings filmed, each one with a different character being guilty. This does not surprise me at all. This is a movie that jerks us around simply for the sole fact that it wants to jerk us around. It doesn't want us to figure it out, and it doesn't play fair. When I realized that there was no point in following the clues and the movie simply plays to the demands of the filmmaker and which ending worked best with test audiences, it made me hate this shallow and silly excuse for a thriller even more.

The film centers on an investigative journalist named Rowena (Halle Berry) who specializes in going undercover and exposing corporate and political frauds with the help of her creepy best friend and co-worker Miles (Giovanni Ribisi) who seems to have a certain unhealthy obsession with her that is painfully obvious to the audience, yet Rowena seems blissfully ignorant to. Rowena's having a tough time after she quits her job due to one of her stories falling through and a childhood friend of hers named Grace (Nicki Aycox) turns up dead. The two women just happened to have a chance meeting in a subway shortly before Grace's murder, and she told Rowena about how she had been having an on-line affair with a powerful New York ad executive named Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis). Grace had mentioned that their relationship had recently soured, and that Harrison was no longer talking to her. When evidence pops up that Grace may have been pregnant, Harrison becomes all the more suspicious to Rowena, especially since the man is married and has a long history of past affairs. Deciding to investigate on her own, Rowena turns up at Harrison's corporate office as a Temp and tries to get close to him, with Miles trying to dig up more dirt on the guy. Naturally, things are not what they seem, and the movie has more red herrings than a fresh fish market to keep us guessing in sheer futility.

There's nothing exactly wrong with the concept behind Perfect Stranger, and director James Foley certainly gives the movie an attractive look. The problem lies with the screenplay by Todd Komarnicki. He seems to be trying to make an erotic murder thriller along the lines of Basic Instinct, but the movie is not very erotic nor is it very thrilling. The pace is leisurely to the point of being nearly stagnant, and the few sex scenes contained within the film are completely and instantly forgettable. I guess we're supposed to be enthralled by the twisting plot that casts everyone who plays a major role into a shadowy light. The movie stresses time and time again that everyone has dirty secrets, and yes, many secrets are exposed. The problem is almost all of these secrets exist simply to throw us off course. Not one leads to the correct answer. The answer exists simply in whatever of the three endings worked out the best. A thriller like this has to be planned out and lead to one true answer, not whatever answer the filmmakers feel like.

Long before we find out that the movie doesn't even want to play fair, Perfect Stranger never truly captures our attention to start with. The characters are murky at best and, as previously mentioned, exist simply to lead us in multiple directions. They are victims of a plot that knows it's clever. They have no personality and no real motivation other than to act as red herrings. A good example is the character of Harrison Hill, who is slimy simply because he is supposed to be slimy for the sake of the story. He cheats on his wife, he threatens his business enemies, and when he finds out that one of his employees has been leaking info to an outside source, he physically abuses him right in front of all the other employees. None of these actions truly matter. They have no motivation and they do not drive his character to any sort of goal. We can't become attached to these people, because they're not even human to start with.

Since winning the Oscar for Monster's Ball, Halle Berry seems to be on a strange single-minded quest to kill her career. Chalk up another loss for Berry. She's passable at best, but just about any other actress could have filled her shoes, and she brings nothing to the character. Same goes for Bruce Willis, who has absolutely no charisma, and we cannot understand why he is such a ladies man except for the fact that the movie tells us he is. The only performance that does stand out is Giovanni Ribisi as Miles, and it's for all the wrong reasons. He is immediately suspicious to us, because Ribisi plays up the weirdness of his character almost from the instant he walks onto the screen. This makes the fact that Berry's character does not even seem the least bit unnerved by him make her come across as a total idiot.

I will not reveal the ending of Perfect Stranger, but I will say this. When the ending comes, did you personally see anything during the course of the movie that could have led us to the conclusion it wants to lead us to? We don't get the full story beforehand. All the clues, all the evidence, all the paths it had led us down had nothing to do with anything. The movie is a great big exploding cigar that laughs at us when everything blows up in our face. There are no right and wrong answers. Just one very uninteresting movie that doesn't even have the nerve to play fair.

Have you ever met someone who you didn't like at first but, after you made an effort, they kinda got your attention?

I had to make the effort with Perfect Stranger. It is not an easy movie to like. Its direction seems pedestrian, the camera-work and editing wanting, and the acting wasted. The characters are not very nice people, but not evil enough to be anti-heroes.

But let's work backwards. It has a killer ending. If you worked hard to follow the complex plot, your efforts pay off. That makes you feel good. Like listening to a person you can't get away from who has droned for an hour and a half and then suddenly what they are saying makes a warped kind of sense. The plot might be convoluted, but I have to admire the way it fits the horrible, cynical pieces together. An hour afterwards, it reminds me of old B-movies that you might dig up and pick little gems from their rotting carcass.

So what's it about? Well, it could be about anything - no, that's me being too disingenuous. It's a mystery thriller. A whodunnit. It has Halle Berry moving through several personas and Bruce Willis being quite disgusting and yet getting our sympathies. She's an investigative reporter. He's the head of an advertising agency. Then there's some fabulous shots from the newly-completed 7 World Trade Center, the first of the new buildings on the former WTC site. Look out for stunning wraparound views of Lower Manhattan, the Hudson River, and New Jersey.

Annoyingly, the film doesn't glamorise its strengths. A key early conversation between Halle Berry (Rowena) and her pal Grace is almost overpowered by the background noise of the subway trains. Almost, but not quite - are you paying attention? The views of New York are more impressive when you think back to them. But at the time we see them, we are trying to figure out what kind of game Harrison Hill is playing. Similarly, an early scene of outrage that could have grandstanded Berry's acting talents is subsumed into a very ordinary establishing shot. But condemn it early on at your peril. Dismiss it and you forego the enjoyment of a well-constructed mystery, even if it doesn't live up to the star ratings its big names might suggest. This film doesn't follow the 'good' rules, you long for something to spice it up. Some flashy camera-work, fancy edits maybe. Or something sexy with Halle Berry's legs? And you don't get much of that. Does the story have you by the balls yet? Probably not. "Stroke a man's (beep), you get him for one night - stroke his ego and you get him for life." Grace's comment only hits us after we leave the cinema. It might not be that simple, but Rowena, like any good journalist, only does 'sexy' here for effect.

Rowena's pal winds up dead. Very dead. Horribly, bloated, facelessly dead. At this point, I was still thinking how they 'should' have directed the movie to give it more impact. Later on, I appreciate the understated style. It also leaves you free to follow the plot more carefully than if you are having clues and red herrings rammed down your throat.

Rowena takes on another identity to get a job at Harrison Hill's agency, as well as some more online personas. The powerful Mr Hill seems to have been in everyone's pants (even though he has a genuinely stunning wife). Yet Willis plays the role with such honesty that we almost don't want him to get caught out. He might be a sleaze but Rowena's co-investigator, Miles, is a sleaze-ball of a different kind. Miles does online jiggery-pokery to find out stuff for Rowena. But he is also a different kind of twisted power-tripper and runs rings around her.

Perfect Stranger lulls us into moral condemnation. Its outlook of the world is totally cynical. "Show me a beautiful woman and I'll show you a man who's tired of (beep)ing her," confides a Hill employee to Berry. When you meet the perfect stranger do you assume the best? Or do you assume the worst?

"To a certain extent, everybody lives a double life," says Academy Award winner Halle Berry. "We're all complicated beings; we're different people all the time - for example, a woman might act differently at work than she does at home. We all hide something, even from our best friends. This movie highlights that and takes it to the next level, showing what we're capable of when we're forced to come to terms with it."

OK, we know that nothing and no-one is perfect, and we accept that they everyone and everything is 'packaged', right down to the Veronica Secret gift bag that the ad agency is giving away. But ultimately Perfect Stranger is packaged as carelessly as if it were wrapped in second-hand gift wrap. That makes it easy to dismiss. Or loathe. But its self-effacing, redeeming qualities are perhaps sufficient not to ignore. Mystery thriller geeks, get your ticket now, before it is condemned to obscurity.

(note - I have censored certain words from the quotes from the film for this site)

PERFECT STRANGER is a fast-paced little crime mystery of a film that despite the innumerable sidebars of undeveloped information scattered throughout the script does manage to surprise the audience at the end. The movie seems to be a vehicle for the beautiful Halle Berry to show off her skills and other assets: Bruce Willis is billed as a co-star but his role is minor and unexpectedly underplayed - a nice little tour de force for the king of action flicks.

Berry plays a reporter with a man's nom de plume that allows her to uncover secrets of famous people for newsy stories. Once fired from her job for uncovering the deeds of a Senator who is promoted by her newspaper, she teams her good buddy Giovanni Ribisi, a wizard of information about the media and internet spying, and the two go after a wealthy ad executive (Bruce Willis) when the murder of one of Berry's old girlfriends stirs both her wrath and her own secret demons. The chase is on with Berry playing games of deceit backed by the skills of Ribisi. And just when the plot seems to have uncovered the murderer, then another line of story involving Ribisi and Berry explodes the audience's tracking of the crime with a rather good ending.

Berry is fine in her role as is Ribisi with his: Willis is not on the screen long enough to form an opinion, a fact that is actually rather a refreshing twist! The camera loves Berry in all her glamour and manages to turn sordid when the plot elements necessitate that. It is a fair evening's diversion and were it not for all the 'dropped ideas' that plead development, it would be a stronger thriller. Grady Harp