Perfect Stranger

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There's nothing "perfect" about "Perfect Stranger"--except, perhaps, the way that Halle Berry dresses up every frame she's in. From the extras it's clear that co-stars Bruce Willis and Giovanni Ribisi liked doing the movie because they got to work closely with Berry. Risking a chauvinist label, they basically said she was some pretty tasty eye candy. And they're right. She is pleasing to look at.

But "Perfect Stranger" is supposed to be a tense thriller, and so it's going to take more than star power or a Blu-ray pristine sheen to make it work.

The first act of this 109-minute film by James Foley ("Fear") proceeds with a fair amount of normalcy and interest, even if there are a few lines that stand out in a conspicuously unnatural way, and even though Berry's character is a bit of a cliché. Here, she's a crusading reporter who's just had a big investigative story squashed because of politics. No sooner than she gets slurring drunk with a co-worker (Ribisi) in self-consolation does another story fall into her lap. A woman she's known before gives her the name of Harrison Hill (Willis), who is married to money and apparently is notorious for having affairs with people from his gigantic temp agency. It's not exactly the same sort of story as busting a politician, and it's never really clear what makes it such a newsworthy scandal that would interest Ro (Berry) until the woman turns up dead.

And so Ro goes undercover two different ways, posing as a chat-room vamp to engage Hill and get some sort of unspecified goods on him, and hiring on as a temp worker who somehow has no problem going right to the top and catching Hill's eye.

I won't spoil things for viewers, but let me just say that as things unfold you
expect there to be twists. As my wife astutely observed very early in the film, "You know (Willis) can't be the killer because they have him working on a Victoria's Secret campaign. A company like that wouldn't allow itself to be associated with a killer." Some sleuth, my wife. But the twists that this takes are both obvious (after all, we're only dealing with a limited number of characters here) and unbelievable. In the end, everything goes back to an earlier incident that doesn't satisfactorily explain the Jekyll/Hyde behavior of the "perp."

As the second act becomes tedious and the third spirals into a parallel universe that's too far out for any of this to be believed, you can't help but think back to those clunky lines that betrayed a certain clumsiness. Just as the killer is revealed, the script ends up being exposed as not nearly as intelligent as it pretended.

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