Perfect Stranger (Cert 15, 109 mins)
Stars: Halle Berry, Bruce Willis, Giovanni Ribisi, Richard Portnow, Gary Dourdan
Directed by James Foley
IT MAY be time Halle Berry got a new agent. She has recently accepted so many movie clunkers that one wonders who is advising the poor girl.
Perfect Stranger must rank as one of her career lows, a so-called techno thriller of such crass stupidity that one wonders how a director like James Foley got involved, never mind Ms Berry.
She plays an investigative journalist who writes under a man’s name (the film’s theme is all about false identity and lies) and tries to track down the killer of a girl friend.
Prime suspect is businessman Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) and Berry, attacks him on two fronts, talking to him on an internet chat room and joining his staff. There is nothing filmic abut people on computers, so Willis and Berry read the chatroom scripts aloud – a ridiculous compromise. Scriptwriter Todd Komarnicki throws in red herrings and sudden twists that come out of nowhere, making the whole storyline even dafter. Ms Berry, whose mother was Liverpool-born, is all at sea in a story that generally makes little sense. How she must look fondly back to her Oscar-winning performance film, Monster’s Ball, and wonder how she ended up in things like Catwoman and this piece of movie nonsense. | 
