The Perfect Man: Critic Reviews

Duff's character has problems too (she's tired of moving from city to city), but no actress this synthetically wholesome should engage in this much whining.

The flimsy new Hilary Duff comedy toys with the notion of mother-daughter role reversal.

So imperfect that it may qualify as one of the summer's worst movies.

Mostly the movie produces yawns when it's not producing awe that someone even bothered to make it.

The movie doesn't even seem to know how disturbing, at its heart, its subject matter is, so that it can at least have fun with it.

The movie's foolish fantasy comes awfully close to seeming nuts.

Like a Nike commercial without a shot of the sneakers.

The story has a definite ick factor that detracts from even the small pleasures the movie might offer its teen audience.

The Perfect Man isn't perfect, but it's not bad company for 100 minutes.

Ms. Duff projects so much appeal that she leaps over lapses in logic like Super Mario over lava pits. Ms. Locklear helps, too, showing vulnerability and a bit of tenderness.

Duff has found a formula that works, on TV or on screen, as a loving, loyal and slightly confused high schooler.

The Perfect Man takes its idiotic plot and uses it as the excuse for scenes of awesome stupidity.

We all realize two things: Noth is way too good for this stuff, and blogs are totally over.

The premise is patently ridiculous, but the target audience of 12-year-old girls will be too charmed by the genre requisites to care.

As an actress, Duff has failed to grow, except in acquisition of highlights, showing an emotional range running the gamut from pout to sulk.

The characters' victories never seem hard-won, their losses never seem painful, and the happy ending is guaranteed.

If it's still something of a formula teen movie -- cute guy, kids fixing parents' lives, spunky sidekick, darling outfits, etc. -- it also touches on some issues outside the formula.

If you tweaked the movie's giggly tone a little bit, you'd probably have a decent thriller about a maladjusted teen out to emotionally destroy her dim-bulb mother.

[The] situation is mined mostly for mild chuckles and tepid sentiment.

Most of this movie is beyond lame.

It's shy about addressing anything that requires a moment's thought -- selfish irresponsible parents, selfishly bratty kids, lying, talking others into lying.

In the cautionary dystopian science-fiction parable The Perfect Man, we are offered a terrifying vision of a possible future: a world ruled by Hilary Duff.

When Duff finally realizes that she actually has found the perfect man for her mom, the web of mischief and deceit she has created almost seems too thick to destroy. But The Perfect Man is the kind of movie in which such webs become cotton candy.

An audience has to buy that Locklear's character, Jean Hamilton, gets dumped by every guy she dates. And whenever this happens, she immediately moves her family to another part of the continent.

Seriously, the perfect man would call social services.