Despite the presence of Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, Perfect Stranger is too convoluted to work, and features a twist ending that's irritating and superfluous. It's a techno-thriller without thrills.
Despite the presence of Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, Perfect Stranger is too convoluted to work, and features a twist ending that's irritating and superfluous. It's a techno-thriller without thrills.
A hard-nosed star reporter learns who her real friends are -- and gets in way over her head -- investigating a murder in this twisty thriller. Perfect Stranger stars Halle Berry as Rowena, a prominent New York journalist who writes using a pseudonym to entrap some of the tri-state area's most corrupt individuals, using a network of informants, acquaintances, and digital gadgets. When her latest exposé is buried at the behest of her paper's corporate backers, she walks off the job and into a
personal quagmire. Her childhood friend Grace (Nicki Aycox) is murdered when she threatens to reveal she's been sleeping with married advertising mogul Harrison Hill (Bruce Wills). With the help of her loyal techie friend Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), she goes undercover -- and online -- to find the smoking gun that will indict Hill. But Rowena soon finds herself caught in a web of manipulation, deceit, and false truths. ~ Michael Hastings, Rovi
The movie would perhaps like to say something serious about the ease with which modern communications allows us to be multiple personalities, but that effort is lost in ineptitude.
For those who are interested in Berry as both an actress and screen presence, this is one of the most satisfying films she has ever made. It capitalizes on her strengths and she owns the picture, from start to finish.
Columbia seems to be on a one-studio mission to revive that very '90s of film genres, the erotic thriller--or are they determined to kill it off for good, considering such poor efforts as this listless Halle Berry vehicle?
A chat 'n cheat Internet thriller about the potential fatal cyber-attraction of online flirting, the film is more sordid than suspenseful when it comes to messy human relations filtered through the World Wide Web.
A big cheat because virtually nothing of what happens in the first 100 minutes would ever really have happened if the truth that's exposed in the final few minutes was true.
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 presciently betrayed a certain clumsiness.
While Perfect Stranger had its moments and wisely made its characters less than perfect, it was a pedestrian yarn better suited for the small screen than the silver one.
The movie shows that the only thing worse than a generically screwy thriller is one with a selective narrator -- and one that doesn't give viewers a fair chance to play along.
Un thriller más bien mediocre, inverosímil y rebuscado que pretende sorprender al espectador con una vuelta de tuerca final... igualmente mediocre, inverosímil y rebuscada.
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