Movie Reviews

Review in a Hurry:  Halle Berry and Bruce Willis stumble through this misbegotten thriller about a journalist investigating an old friend's murder. An early contender for year-end Worst Everything awards.

The Bigger Picture:  You don't want to pick this up. Perfect Stranger is such a howler that after you watch it you'll be 30 percent dog.

Berry stars as a notorious (yet still unidentified!) muckraker who writes under a man's name for nebulous and mostly irrelevant reasons. When a childhood friend turns up dead, Berry delves into the murky circumstances of the crime, with her nerdy, sweaty-palmed researcher (Giovanni Ribisi) as backup. When early suspicion falls on a debonair ad man (Willis), Berry does the only thing that makes sense: She goes undercover at Willis' agency as a temp and starts flirting anonymously with her new boss online.

See what I just did there? I pretended that the plot of Perfect Stranger was a reasonable proposition. In truth it's anything but, only describable with such compound hyperwords as "prepostiludicrous" or "unbeluridable."

It's so bad it needs new words for bad.

The acting is atrocious, the script is dead on arrival, and the plot is somehow both inane and insulting. I don't know who their technical adviser was, but they could have gotten better suggestions from any random teen on MySpace.

And then there's a shocking! twist! ending! that achieves the unprecedented feat of turning one bad movie into two bad movies—the one you just watched and the slightly-different-but-no-better one you were apparently meant to be looking for. This new light doesn't illuminate anything in particular, just drives home a point you probably already understood: This Stranger is wasting your time.