DVD Review: Perfect Stranger

By Jeff Swindoll Aug 21, 2007, 13:01 GMT

When her friend’s affair with married ad exec Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) ends in the woman’s murder, investigative reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry) vows to bring the killer to justice. Suspecting Hill of the crime, she goes undercover by posing as two highly alluring women: Katherine, a sexy temp who works within his agency, and Veronica, a seductive temptress he chats up online. Engaging in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, ...more

Halle Berry and Bruce Willis star in this tepid thriller.  One has to ask if she stars in a few more of these will they take her Oscar away?

Reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry) and her assistant Miles Haley (Giovanni Ribisi) are working on an expose on a prominent Senator.  However, when the paper spikes the story she decides to quit.  Another story falls into her lap when her friend Grace (Nicki Aycox) tells her that she met advertising exec Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) online and Mr. Hill had a little more on his mind than chatting. 

When Grace is found in the river, Ro smells an even bigger story.  She gets computer hacker Miles to set her up with a temp agency job at Hill’s agency.  She sees that Hill has a hairpin temper and she also starts to chat with him under another alias that Miles has set up for her.  So now Ro finds herself immersed in the mystery of who killed Grace and now finds herself having to cozy up to Mr. Hill to keep up her identity undercover. 

Halle Berry is very easy on the eyes and spends some of the time in some form fitting clothes, however this does not a good movie make.  Sure it’s nice to look at but this is a supposed Oscar winning actress so the bar is pretty high in the acting department. 

The problem is that after winning her Oscar, Berry has appeared in films that haven’t exactly been Oscar worthy.  I think that Catwoman had more of a chance of winning a Razzie than an Oscar.  In fact, it did win Razzies for Worst Picture and Worst Actress. 

Although Perfect Stranger isn’t exactly Catwoman, it isn’t a great picture either.  The mystery seems a bit too easy to figure out till they pull a fast one at the ending to fashion a twist that seems contrived and just fashioned to pull a twist. 

The film claims to be a sexy thriller, but I didn’t see much that I would consider very sexy.  In fact, some of the sexual peccadilloes of some of the characters are anything but sexy. 

Everyone in the film has a secret and director James Foley is trying to play on the fact that everyone has secrets.  The film is so contrived that I wished that the filmmakers had kept this one a secret. 

Perfect Stranger is presented in anamorphic widescreen (2.40:1) and enhanced for 16x9 televisions.  A fullscreen version is available separately.  Special features are rather sparse. 

They consist of the 12 minute “Virtual Lives: The Making of Perfect Stranger.”  It has interviews with Halle Berry, director James Foley, Giovanni Ribisi, Bruce Willis, screenwriter Todd Komarnicki, producer Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, co-producer Daniel Thomas, costume designer Renee Ehrlich Kalfus, and production designer Bill Groom. 

Perfect Stranger is a “sexy thriller” that doesn’t offer much of either.  I didn’t really care for any of the performances in the film and the ending seemed to be fashioned just so that the film would have the prerequisite twist that some audiences expect these days. 

Perfect Stranger is now available at Amazon. It is available for pre-order at AmazonUK for a Sept. 10th release. Visit the DVD database for more information.