There was a reason that we were all warned as kids to be wary of strangers and PERFECT STRANGER reinforces that. Lifeless, plodding, pat, and predictable when it’s not being preposterous, this dreck is an assault on the audience’s intelligence. It doesn’t so much unfold as run out of steam, not that it had much of a head of steam to begin with.
There’s a murder, a crack investigative reporter, Rowena (Halle Berry) who is ticked off about having her prize story killed, her adoring research assistant and on-call techie, Miles (Giovani Ribisi), and Harrison Hill, the ad executive with a wandering eye (Bruce Willis), who may or may not be a murderer, but is definitely a cad. Ro goes undercover as a toothsome temp at Hill’s agency in order to get the goods on him and, naturally, catches his eye. Never mind that a helpfully chatty co-worker has already delivered all the office gossip about Hill’s sexual adventures with co-workers, including the tidbit that he’s been shut down in that department by his suspicious wife. That would be the wife who has all the money in her name. On cue, as in before you can say “hello sailor,” Hill engages in naughty online chat with Ro, hangs around her desk, meets her at parties for very public drinks, and picks her up for work in the morning. While we do learn the recipe for a Hemmingway daiquiri, we are never enlightened about why Ro, the putative temp, living at one of the swankiest addresses in Manhattan doesn’t seem suspicious to Hill or anyone else, especially in the light of all the industrial spying that’s been going on.
Burdened with a weak rambling script that rambles about with both insouciance and incoherence, as well as a director that seems to have thrown in the towel after the first reel, our intrepid the actors fall back on their favorite idiosyncratic tricks. . Berry reverts to 40s style melodrama, Willis to his stony-faced smirk, and Ribisi to his dark quirkiness. Some psychological sleight-of-hand is tossed in as an underpinning for the final twist, both of which have the smack of desperation. After the first reveal, which is about as surprising as the sun rising in the east every morning, the twists flail along one after another until enough people have been incarcerated, incriminated, or killed to prevent any further deus ex machinas from imposing themselves on us.
Then there are the non-sequitors. There is the slipping on the panties sequence tossed in for no better reason than to exploit Ms Berry’s assets without adding anything to the through plot. There’s the interchangeability between night and day in the intercutting of two sequences allegedly occurring at the same time. There’s the batter-the-employee sequence that barely raises an eyebrow at Hill’s agency, much less a call to the police or a lawsuit from the batter-ee. There’s the arrest scene calibrated around a killer view from a hotel window rather than verisimilitude. To be fair, that last would be one of the many gratuitous product placements woven into the plot. And one can only be impressed by the range, from lingerie to sneakers, from alcoholic beverages to laptops. Alas, that is the only stretch of creativity in a film that devotes several minutes of it running time to watching Ro put gift bags together.
There are no thrills, no suspense, and no chemistry between Berry and anyone else on screen with her. PERFECT STRANGER is a schlep through a convoluted story long on details and short, very short on focus. Heed those warnings from your childhood and run away.
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