Willis' presence alone leavens the picture: He makes a seductive, witty villain, a guy whose charisma, and not his libido, is his own worst enemy. For one thing, it doesn't make the mistake of taking itself too seriously. "Perfect Stranger" was directed by James Foley (whose credits include "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Who's That Girl?") the writers are Todd Komarnicki and Jon Bokencamp. But by the time those secrets are revealed - most of them in a rushed wrap-up at the very end of the picture - we've been through so many tortured, screenwriters-workshop-style plot twists that we've almost forgotten how we felt about any of those characters in the first place. Everyone here has a secret, and some of those secrets are bigger than others. Of course, as in most mediocre thrillers - and in many good ones - people are not everything they appear to be. By night she titillates him via sexy, anonymous online chats, fielding questions along the lines of that whiskery chestnut, "What are you wearing?" With the help of one of her former co-workers, tech whiz Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), she sets out to trap Hill: By day, she works, undercover, as a temp at his agency - a kind of Mata Hari of Madison Avenue - harvesting gossip from her chatty co-workers and monitoring the boss's careless flirtations, which he strives to keep secret from his ultrajealous wife. Understandably disillusioned and embittered, Rowena quits her job in a clatter of spike heels, only to stumble onto a case bigger than anything she has ever encountered: When the body of an old friend shows up in a Gotham morgue, she has reason to believe that a rakish Manhattan advertising magnate named Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) is the killer. "Jesus Christ!" the miscreant exclaims, like a villain in a "Superman" comic, his balls having been suitably and duly busted.īut Rowena's paper, unwilling to turn tail on a politician it had previously endorsed, kills the story. "I work for David Shane at the New York Courier!" she announces, dropping the bomb.
In the movie's first scene, she ambushes a conservative anti-gay rights legislation senator, confronting him with pictures that show him cavorting with one of his young male interns. Halle Berry plays Rowena, an inquisitive reporter for a New York tabloid who, in print, goes by the name David Shane so no one will know she's a woman.
Yet there's a vast, possibly bottomless pit reserved for thrillers that are neither good nor bad enough to be truly entertaining, and James Foley's "Perfect Stranger" tumbles right into it. Theoretically, there should be no such thing as a mediocre thriller: Either it thrills or it doesn't.
0 kommentar(er)
