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After her childhood friend, Grace (Nicki Aycox), is found brutally murdered, investigative journalist Rowena (Halle Berry) goes undercover to find the killer. Just before she was killed, Grace revealed that she’d met advertising bigwig Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) online—and it had led to an offline relationship. When she moved to New York to be close to him, he suddenly stopped returning her calls. Grace had threatened to tell his wife about their affair—and she was killed just days later.
With the help of her loyal researcher and friend, Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), Rowena decides to go after Hill. First, she hits the chat rooms to hunt him down and catch him in the act. Then she gets a temp job at his advertising agency so she can get a little closer. And she slowly gets the attention of the hard-nosed, womanizing businessman, whose personal affairs are carefully guarded and managed by a beautiful yet stern woman named Josie (Daniella Van Graas).
Before I saw Perfect Stranger, I’d heard a lot of reactions from my fellow critics—none of them good. As I watched, though, I began to wonder why they’d hated it as much as they did. Sure, it’s cheesy, with its bad acting and its smoky flashbacks—which are obviously supposed to signify something very important. The plot is thin, and sometimes it seems like little more than a two-hour celluloid shrine to Halle Berry’s supreme beauty (much like the shrine that her creepy friend, Miles, has hidden in his apartment). But at least it isn’t painful to watch. It moves along at a decent pace, and the story’s somewhat entertaining—like a mildly interesting episode of Law & Order: SVU. One that you keep on in the background while you’re making dinner. Definitely not great—but not horrible, either.
But then the last 15 minutes or so made it all make sense. Not the story, mind you. The story made very little sense at all after those last brain-numbing 15 minutes. But my colleagues’ reactions definitely made sense. Because after those last 15 minutes, instead of being a mildly interesting yet somewhat predictable ode to Halle Berry, Perfect Stranger becomes an unpredictably ridiculous mess. The end is supposed to be shocking—and I was certainly shocked. But instead of gasping and walking out of the theater with a pleasantly stunned expression on my face, I just sat there, staring at the credits, until I couldn’t hold back anymore—and I started laughing. I laughed my way out of the theater, through the parking lot, and all the way home. Because it was just that bad. It couldn’t have been any more ridiculous if, in the end, Bronson Pinchot had appeared to reveal that his Cousin Larry was really the killer. In fact, that may have been an improvement.
