Perfect Stranger

Posted by Brian C. Gibson (brian@filmschoolrejects.com) on April 13, 2007

Director James Foley has built quite a pattern in his career. Going from directing a hit, Glengarry Glen Ross, to directing a bomb like Fear. Then he directed another hit, Confidence, just to follow it up with another bomb…

When a journalist (Halle Berry) is confronted by a childhood friend for help, she thinks nothing of it. But when her friend turns up dead, she decides to go after the man she thinks is responsible. Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) is a business man who has alot to lose, and was the last man to be involved with the recently deceased.

Well, I know I’m going to end up in some heat for this one. Halle Berry cannot act. She is extraordinarily beautiful, and I have even been witness to her beauty in person. However, her looks couldn’t save this one. The only thing that came even close to saving this film were the performances from Bruce Willis and Giovanni Ribisi. Even saying that, that’s not saying alot about the film. Both Willis and Ribisi’s characters were incredibly cliche and didn’t do much to help progress the story. It just felt like a series of recycled scenes from other movies that weren’t that great either.

The plot was dense and uninteresting. This is yet another piece of the Hollywood machine. The machine that takes bad writing, and tries to mix it with a solid director and some super celebrity power. The only problem is that people actually pay to see movies like this, and will continue to pay for movies like this. The only saving grace would have been a flashy ending. Some might say that this film had a great ending, a cliff-hanger. I would say that it was just smoke and mirrors to hide the film for what it really was, garbage or Gothika 2.

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