Movie Review: Perfect Stranger

Looking for a way to waste an evening? Do you like films that lack any pretense of believability? Do you like having everything explained to you in the final ten minutes of a movie? Do you enjoy watching movies that are all about the plot, even when the plot doesn't know where it's going? If so, Perfect Stranger may be the perfect movie for you. I tell you, there is more believability in any one episode of Perfect Strangers than there is in this movie. If you desire a movie that throws out the idea of suspension of disblief and goes straight to the disbelief, this will likely top you best movies of 2007 list. However, if you are a little more discerning in your movie selection, you going to want to look elsewhere.

For some reason, I was under the assumption that this was going to be halfway decent. Sure, I was exhausted of seeing the trailer at just about every movie I've seen over the mast couple of months, but it looked like it had an interesting concept going for it. Not a terribly original concept, mind you, but a concept does not have to be entirely original to be a good movie. What we are faced with is a movie that sports poor acting in an effort to purposely mislead the audience, setting up the shocking twist ending which successfully negates everything that has come before it, essentially rendering the viewing of the movie to be completely unnecessary.

The movie opens with the obligatory scene that sets up just who Halle Berry is and what her character does, which sets up what she is going to be doing for most of the movie. Halle Berry is Rowena, an investigative reporter who has made a career out of donning false identities to uncover her stories. When the story in the opening goes south, she immediately finds herself confronted with another opportunity to use her skills of deception, only this time on something of a more personal mission, but one that also holds the potential for a great news story, her ticket back to the top.

On a creepy subway platform, Rowena is approached by an old friend named Grace (Nicki Aycox), who tells her of an affair she had with advertising bigwig Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis). Well, it seems that he had his fun and has just cut her off. Grace is intent on getting what she believes she deserves, but shows up dead a week later. Well, this sets Ro off on her next job, go undercover and try to nail Hill for the murder of her friend. So, with the help of her tech-geek partner, Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), she sets about gathering the evidence she needs to get Hill for the murder.

Any veteran of this type of movie knows, there is going to be a big twist when the killer and reasons are revealed. This is no different, once the climax comes everything is revealed. The problem is that it renders the film pointless, it also raises the level of believability to near art. If ever there was a story that is rendered pointless by the way it ends, this is it. It took a bad movie and just completely sunk it. Besides what it did to the body of the movie, it took way too long to explain. Talk about frustrating.

By now you all know that the ending is awful, how about the rest of the movie? Not much better. The acting is rather poor, and the dialogue even worse. Structurally, the story moves through the motions too fast, things happen way too easily, from Rowena getting the fake name and the job to getting close to the boss, and let's not even get into the whole chatroom scene. Halle Berry seems to be suffering from over/underacting spasms, she is either way over the top, or barely breathing.

Bottomline. This is just a poor movie, start to finish. Poorly acted, poorly plotted, and completely ludicrous. It is shot decent enough, but the story is enough to drag everything down. This is one that can safely be skipped.

Not Recommended.