Perfect Stranger
Perfect Stranger
R | 19 April 2007 (USA)
Perfect Stranger Trailers

A journalist goes undercover to ferret out businessman Harrison Hill as her best friend's killer. Posing as one of his temps, she enters into a game of online cat-and-mouse.

Reviews
Supelice Dreadfully Boring
Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.
Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
sddavis63 The cast was promising - the stars of this are Bruce Willis as Harrison and Halle Berry as Ro - and the story seemed mildly interesting. Ro's friend is murdered, and Ro tries to figure out who the killer is, suspecting a guy that her friend was having an anonymous internet romance with. OK. Like I said - it seemed promising. But it turned out to be dreadfully dull for most of its runtime.It starts with an actual interesting story about Ro (an investigative reporter) confronting a US Senator about a sex scandal. But that turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie. I guess it just establishes that Ro is a hotshot investigative reporter. OK. You could have just told us that. Then her friend gets murdered and she has to figure out who did it. So we spend a huge amount of time watching Ro pretending to be someone else, sending online messages to "ADEX," who she thinks is Harrison. Meanwhile Ro's friend Miles is some sort of tech wizard who spends a lot of his time hacking. Is this serious? Even in 2007 online romances and hacking would have seemed a bit dated. But by 2017? Let's just say that this ten year old movie already seems much older. But I get the sense that the viewer is supposed to be dazzled by this high tech wizardry. The movie meanders and sputters along, with none of it being especially interesting. Then - after 75-80 minutes of boredom, it's as if writer Todd Komarnicki suddenly realized that the script was a dud and filled the last 20- 25 minutes with no fewer than three plot twists. So we go from the killer that the whole movie had suggested, to a new killer, only to find that the old killer was really the killer, only to discover that there was actually a different killer. My mind had gone numb by this point. For the record - plot twist # 1 (which dealt with Miles' relationship with Ro) was the most interesting, and plot twist # 3 (which revealed the real killer) was, I confess, totally unexpected. But, still, you can't save a movie that's been boring for almost an hour and a half with plot twist after plot twist after plot twist. Komarnicki also gives us a lot of unnecessary backstory about Ro's childhood and her abusive father and he throws in the "f" word a lot. In my experience overuse of the "f" word is a sure sign that a writer knows he's written a dud, and rather than actually fixing the script he throws in the "f" word as much as possible, apparently thinking that prolific use of the "f" word will make a movie seem hard-hitting and exciting. (Memo to all script writers: IT DOESN'T WORK!!) Not a movie I would recommend at all. (4/10)
junktodelete-155-36017 Boy what a find! Critics only rated the movie 5-6 but what were they thinking? I gave it a 10 just because it's overall average rating was so undeservedly low. I've never done that before but what an injustice to the writers for a 9-ish performance. Halle has never been more beautiful, wow! She also did a 10 performance I thought. The only reason I gave the writers 8-9... is the computer hacking guy's skills were too unrealistic; if he's so good what's he doing working for a newspaper etc? And the online interactions were a little confusing to me but I was able to overlook all of that and enjoyed the movie. I got it cheap as it's so old now and and I don't know anyone who would regret watching it and quite the opposite. It's a minimum of an 8 and should be rated even higher in my opinion. Halles undercover roles to me were very convincing. I could actually see her doing those roles in real life...
sundaresh-venugopal One can only wonder why ? If money was really good, then why should loving something good be evil ? One might as well say God is good but loving God is evil, which is blasphemous to say the least. If this remark suggests that being good is irrelevant, inconsequential and immaterial, then why should God have to be good ? and why should you expect him to be so ? and why should you have to try to be like God ? The angry vociferation, "Money is the root of all evil", wrongfully dismissed as a misreading, uttered by one badly bitten and badly burnt by money clearly rings more true and is more trenchant and more poignant than the very same yet subtle insinuation contained in the biblical apophthegm. The fact that you would sooner damn love than damn money, clearly tells me what you secretly love and would rather have, and most certainly cannot do without. Is God so inadequate in himself that he now has to need the use of money to save ? Is God greater than money or is money greater than God ? The actress & scriptwriter of this movie clearly deserve all of your awards, all of your accolades, not to mention all of your material assets as well.
eurograd Perfect Stranger is one of this movies that revisits some often-used (some might say overused) plot involving a high-wheeled corporate person and somebody looking to prove herself and cast away her own demons by engaging in a truth-seeking overture that becomes more than what she had originally signed up for. It is not exactly an innovative opening line, but one that has yielded good movies last 10-12 years.The movie has some serious good acting, especially on he part of Giovanni Ribisi, who proved himself in a role more complex and mature than what he's most known for coming up with on recent years. It also has some subtle but ingenious references to The Devil Wears Prada that are quite easy to notice if you paid attention to the latter. However, the editing has left many loose ties. Some characters have their construction reversed in a manner that appears totally disconnected from the plot. We can try see through the ambiguity of some characters to wonder into their minds, but that doesn't happen at all except for Halle's character (Rowena Price). A couple plot sequences are badly knitted, giving a feeling of like of plot cohesion, and not on the positive way. This is where good acting and a decent story line are clearly lost on bad editing.