Perfect Stranger: Critic Reviews

Perfect Stranger is spam -- not only commercially generated, but irritating in the faith that buyers will be as dumb about Internet-based thrillers as the sellers are. My advice is to delete without opening.

Even after it lurches from the far-fetched into the preposterous, Perfect Stranger leaves a clammy residue of unease.

Instead of eroticism, there is tacky sub-porn; instead of twists, there are knotty plot problems which may or may not have been fixable with script rewrites.

Despite the presence of the luminous Berry, Perfect Stranger is really just another thriller, utterly disposable, in town for a few desultory weeks until it heads off to a mild afterlife on DVD and then richly deserved oblivion.

A laughably overheated thriller from the once promising James Foley.

People peek through windows, hack into computers and sneak into apartments without the slightest hesitation. We're guilty of voyeurism, too, since the primary pleasure to be found is in seeing three confident leads play off each other.

Life is full of choices, and Halle Berry has made another bad one with Perfect Stranger, a perfectly off-putting thriller.

Perfect Stranger isn't great art by any stretch, or even art by any stretch, but it is perfectly functional low-to-middlebrow entertainment -- a B movie at ease inside its own gaudy skin.

A rarely suspenseful thriller with a twist ending of the worst kind: It takes too much explanation.

Perfect Stranger, the new thriller starring Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, is far from perfect and, lame as it is, not quite lousy enough to pan with joy.

Just when you thought The Reaping was the most convoluted and overwrought flashback-riddled thriller starring an Academy Award-winning actress in theaters, along comes Perfect Stranger.

Fairly diverting until it starts becoming ridiculous.

This stupidly contrived thriller is all the more disappointing if you admire previous work by Berry and director James Foley.

A cheesy affair that casts so many baited lures that they tangle each other and don't hook you.

While the story becomes dauntingly complex as it goes, the finale resolves its multiple mysteries seamlessly. Perfect Stranger is the kind of polished diversion that the big studios should deliver twice a month, but don't.

Considering the twirliness of the story, this is a fairly straightforward film that knows where it's going and how to get there. And there's much to be admired in that.

All the hip technology, including e-mail hacking, tiny portable USB devices and fake IM accounts, is supposed to make us feel disoriented by the modern lack of face-to-face communication, but it feels played out and overexplained.

Pink is the new black, 50 is the new 30 and, at the movies, confusion is the new suspense.

Nothing can quite top the climax, which arbitrarily assigns a culprit in a way that makes you question almost every single thing that's transpired up to that point. And no, that's not a good thing in this case.

Its shiny plastic glamour serves to endorse the very phoniness it ought to be warning us about.

One of those formulaic thrillers loaded with a whole lot more plot than common sense.

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.

What would happen if a late-night, D-grade direct-to-cable thriller excised all of the raunchily enjoyable elements and managed to attract an A-list cast? The result might be shockingly like Perfect Stranger.

It might be selling itself as a "sexy thriller," but the cheesy, smirk-inducing reality is that Perfect Stranger would have been on the direct-to-DVD fast track had it not been for the names Halle Berry and Bruce Willis above the title.