After viewing Perfect Stranger, I went on the film's page at the IMDB, and found out that there were three different endings filmed, each one with a different character being guilty. This does not surprise me at all. This is a movie that jerks us around simply for the sole fact that it wants to jerk us around. It doesn't want us to figure it out, and it doesn't play fair. It exists simply to throw red herrings at us and cover all of its bases so that we're left constantly guessing. Of course, the guessing is futile, because anyone could turn out to be the guilty one. When I realized that there was no point in following the clues and the movie simply plays to the demands of the filmmaker and which ending worked best with test audiences, it made me hate this shallow and silly excuse for a thriller even more.

The film centers on an investigative journalist named Rowena (Halle Berry) who specializes in going undercover and exposing corporate and political frauds with the help of her creepy best friend and co-worker Miles (Giovanni Ribisi) who seems to have a certain unhealthy obsession with her that is painfully obvious to the audience, yet Rowena seems blissfully ignorant to. Rowena's having a tough time after she quits her job due to one of her stories falling through and a childhood friend of hers named Grace (Nicki Aycox) turns up dead. The two women just happened to have a chance meeting in a subway shortly before Grace's murder, and she told Rowena about how she had been having an on-line affair with a powerful New York ad executive named Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis). Grace had mentioned that their relationship had recently soured, and that Harrison was no longer talking to her. When evidence pops up that Grace may have been pregnant, Harrison becomes all the more suspicious to Rowena, especially since the man is married and has a long history of past affairs. Deciding to investigate on her own, Rowena turns up at Harrison's corporate office as a Temp and tries to get close to him, with Miles trying to dig up more dirt on the guy. Naturally, things are not what they seem, and the movie has more red herrings than a fresh fish market to keep us guessing in sheer futility.

There's nothing exactly wrong with the concept behind Perfect Stranger, and director James Foley (a veteran filmmaker who has had a long and diverse career that spans everything from Madonna's Who's That Girl to David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross) certainly gives the movie an attractive look. The problem lies with the screenplay by Todd Komarnicki. He seems to be trying to make an erotic murder thriller along the lines of Basic Instinct, but the movie is not very erotic nor is it very thrilling. The pace is leisurely to the point of being nearly stagnant, and the few sex scenes contained within the film are completely and instantly forgettable. I guess we're supposed to be enthralled by the twisting plot that casts everyone who plays a major role into a shadowy light. The movie stresses time and time again that everyone has dirty secrets, and yes, many secrets are exposed. The problem is almost all of these secrets exist simply to throw us off course. Not one leads to the correct answer. The answer exists simply in whatever of the three endings worked out the best. A thriller like this needs to lead to something. It has to be planned out and lead to one true answer, not whatever answer the filmmakers feel like. All of our hard work during the course of the movie is for naught. I felt like a lab rat making it's way through a maze, and when I was done, all I had waiting for me a Styrofoam ball shaped like a hunk of cheese.

Long before we find out that the movie doesn't even want to play fair, Perfect Stranger never truly captures our attention to start with. The characters are murky at best and, as previously mentioned, exist simply to lead us in multiple directions. They are victims of a plot that knows it's clever. They have no personality and no real motivation other than to act as red herrings. A good example is the character of Harrison Hill, who is slimy simply because he is supposed to be slimy for the sake of the story. He cheats on his wife, he threatens his business enemies, and when he finds out that one of his employees has been leaking info to an outside source, he physically abuses him right in front of all the other employees. None of these actions truly matter. They have no motivation and they do not drive his character to any sort of goal. He's playing for the audience. So is everyone else. I mentioned previously about Rowena's creepy best friend, Miles. He sometimes comes across as the best friend character, and sometimes he comes across as an obsessed freak who lurks in dark shadows to spy on Rowena while creepy music whispers on the soundtrack. He's whatever the screenplay wants him to be. I slowly came to realize that these are not characters, but walking and talking plot devices. We can't become attached to these people, because they're not even human to start with.

Since winning the Oscar for Monster's Ball, Halle Berry seems to be on a strange single-minded quest to kill her career appearing in a long string of dud performances in films like Gothika and Catwoman. Chalk up another loss for Berry, because she fails to inject even the slightest bit of personality to her character. She goes through the motions, doing what the screenplay expects of her, but doesn't do much more than that. She's passable at best, but just about any other actress could have filled her shoes, and she brings nothing to the character. Same goes for Bruce Willis, who talks in the same monotone voice throughout the movie, except for those brief moments when he goes into screaming violent rages. He has absolutely no charisma, and we cannot understand why he is such a ladies man except for the fact that the movie tells us he is. The only performance that does stand out is Giovanni Ribisi as Miles, and it's for all the wrong reasons. He is immediately suspicious to us, because Ribisi plays up the weirdness of his character almost from the instant he walks onto the screen. This makes the fact that Berry's character does not even seem the least bit unnerved by him make her come across as a total idiot. I know Ribisi is just doing his job, and we're supposed to suspect everyone, but he still tries a bit too hard at times.
I will not reveal the ending of Perfect Stranger, but I will say this. When the ending comes, did you personally see anything during the course of the movie that could have led us to the conclusion it wants to lead us to? We get a series of flashbacks and scenes that are supposed to make us slap our foreheads and shout out "Of course"! The problem is, most of the stuff it shows us are stuff that the movie intentionally left out beforehand. We weren't getting the full story. All the clues, all the evidence, all the paths it had led us down had nothing to do with anything. The movie is a great big exploding cigar that laughs at us when everything blows up in our face. Of course, that's the way it was supposed to be. The guilty party could have been anyone, and the ending we get was all a whim. There are no right and wrong answers. Just one very uninteresting movie that doesn't even have the nerve to play fair.

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