Perfect Stranger

Sorry, this review doesn’t contain any Balki Bartokomous jokes. I heard Perfect Stranger sucked, but I watched Fracture the other night and figured this couldn’t be as bad as that. I'm not sure why I broke down and watched this (no life). I must have been lured in by Bruce Willis’ receding hairline, Giovanni Ribisi’s creepy charisma, or Halle Berry’s berries (Spoiler: it doesn’t show her berries). Perfect Stranger is directed by James Foley, the guy who brought us Glengarry Glen Ross (a pretty good film), Fear (an awesome film), and The Corruptor (a shit film). This guy is kind of a nobody director, but he still gets movies made. Perfect Stranger may be his last.

The plot involves Halle Berry’s character (Rowena Price…referred to as “Ro” by her friends and associates) chatting online with Bruce Willis’ character (Harrison Hill) in an attempt to find out if he’s involved in the murder of her childhood friend, Grace. Ro works for a newspaper and is trying to get a Pulitzer. Giovanni Ribisi’s character (Miles) is the “tech guy”. He helps Ro set up her online accounts (IOL instead of AOL…not sure what the I stands for…maybe it’s Iranian Online or Internet Online or something) and guides her through her attempts at computer espionage. He’s also secretly, stalkerishly in love with Ro. She likes him as a “friend”. Go figure. Harrison Hill is an adulterous, narcissistic prick. He is the head of an advertising agency that has accounts with Victoria’s Secret (yay) and Reebok (gay). Harrison balls all the women he employs. His wife disapproves of his philandering, so he has a lesbian assistant who is supposed to keep tabs on him. The assistant’s name is Josie, but one of her co-workers (in a pitifully, unfunny scene) refers to her as Cujo-sie. Get it, like the dog? This movie also stars one of the crime techs from CSI. His part is meaningless. He should have used some of his forensic skills to solve the crime. So, all these unlikable characters are wrapped up in this overly complicated plot. I think the intent of the writers was to keep the viewer guessing--you know…a whodunit. The result of this strategy is that this viewer (me) didn’t care who did it. He (I) just wanted everyone to die and didn’t care about the resolution of the goddamned film. Note: The resolution of this goddamned film is a Scooby-Do “this is how it all went down” explanation, using flashbacks to remind you of all the boring shit you had to sit through.

If you decide to watch this movie, be sure to check out the making-of featurette. It’s hilarious. Each actor tells us how great it was working with the other amazing actors. They tell us that James Foley is the greatest director in history since Jesus (not really, but it seems like it). The set designer talks about hot fudge. Very little of the featurette actually deals with the making of the movie. It’s mostly ego-stroking. I think you can correlate how shitty a film is by how much ego-stroking occurs in the making-of documentaries. I’d perform a statistical analysis (probably a logistical regression) and give you r-values and p-values and all that, but I’m too lazy.

Poster tagline: Perfect Stranger is a perfect mix of inane plotting, bad acting, lame thrills, and doo-doo.