Perfect Stranger

Rating:	★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Mystery & Suspense

Film rolls Story Formula No. 1—“When investigative reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry) learns that her friend’s murder might be connected to powerful ad executive Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), she goes undercover with the help of her associate, Miles Haley (Giovanni Ribisi). Posing as Katherine Pogue, a temporary secretary at Hill’s ad agency, and Veronica, a girl Hill flirts with online, Rowena surrounds her prey from all sides, only to discover that she isn’t the only one changing identities. The closer Rowena gets to finding the truth, the more we see how far people will go to protect it.” End of story. Ugh!

The trouble with whodunits such as this is that the search for the killer becomes ironically predictable. Because all the lead characters are suspect—and for sure, one of them has to be the culprit, we decipher who he or she is by way of elimination. The “who has done it” question in this case ceases to be, the question now becomes, “which of them has done it?” So we say.

Halle Berry plays Rowena Price/Katherine Pogue/Veronica, a journalist who has the habit of nailing prominent people down through her investigative reportage and exposés.

At the eclipse of his career, Bruce Willis is Harrison Hill, who is plainly a come-on to rake profits for the film, which, reportedly, hardly made any. Quite frankly, the makers of the film took advantage of his damned married life to perfectly portray a philandering corporate executive who uses brawn and lots of testosterone to get everyone going in his ad agency.

Giovanni Ribisi’s role as Berry’s colleague easily places him on our list of potential killers, only to be uselessly used because he is not the killer because he is not the lead actor—though he delivers the better performance than Berry and Willis. Willis’ career hardly dies hard—quite literally, though it better be put to rest. Ribisi should even get the higher topbilling. But it is Bruce Willis, come on! He can hardly have mediocre films—although he is.

The movie plays with its title when at the end of the film we see and realize that Halle Berry’s character herself, the friend of the victim, is the killer. Who can ever expect Berry to be the killer—for throughout the film we are not given much hints that she is—except during flashbacks, which is a trite style in telling a story.

A flashback only becomes a deus ex machina, a literary flaw that is characteristic of weak storylines, very typical of the soap operas. When a storyteller does not know how to solve a rising action and escalating conflict, he resorts to “God in the machine”—to solve the conflict.

In between Berry’s waking and sleeping hours we are shown ambiguous images of her sexually abused childhood. Such insinuations do not suffice for us to consider her dysfunctional or deranged.

In the end we the film audience are the perfect stranger—yes, literally, out of the film and a nobody to whoever produced and made this one –pathetic work—because the film has not established much that it is the deranged woman character of Berry’s that has done all the stalking and the killing. Yes, it is Halle Berry’s character that has been backstabbing us all the while.

With one James Foley at the helm, it is no wonder this film is all about folly. With forgettable works like the unheard “The Corruptor” (1999) and the film version of John Grisham’s The Chamber (1997), we are made fools again by this one hell of a director.

“Perfect Stranger” plays on its title to justify that the killer is the one who looks for herself. Perhaps quite obsessed with the title to deliver its punch, it hardly convinces because all we are presented is the flashback of what she really did—as if there’s a back ground voice in the film whispering to us—“Surprise, surprise, the killer is her, you see!” How come we didn’t guess it right, we’re idiots!

In movies like these, we the audience who paid—expecting to be thrilled for a while—end up the idiot, yes, the stranger, because we hardly knew we were. All along. We are shortchanged, clearly. Perfectly.

Perfectly, the film alienates us from the world of reality or at least logic because it tells us there is no logic anymore. Well, anyway, it is true. Indeed, lack of logic is logical nowadays. We are really estranged.