Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Movie Review (Perfect Stranger)

I remember being in a theatre and seeing the trailer for this movie some time ago. In the trailer it appears that a journalist is attempting to get close to a, supposedly, corrupt man to expose him. This storyline looked fantastic, intense, and dramatic. Halle Berry, Bruse Willis, and Giovanni Ribsi really did a great job as they played their roles out during the course of the film. Unfortunately Miles (Ribisi) is supposed to be a hacker and everytime they show his computer screen during his "hacking" they show ftp logs or he runs fdisk. Neither of these actions will uncover what he should be doing but at least it wasn't cartoony crap. The film is tense at moments as they try to reveal Harrison Hill's (Willis) corruptness, but has these goofy flashbacks to Rowena's (Berry) childhood. As the movie unfolds it plays out kind of like I thought it would and then a train wreck happens in the last five or ten minutes of the film. The writers evidently thought the movie wasn't entertaining so they throw in this weird twist at the end that is completely unnecessary and actually made the film completely suck. I think they were going for the "Sixth Sense" type of shocker but instead of dropping one subtle hint, the wedding ring rolling across the floor in Sixth Sense, they take about five minutes and explain the intricacies of the twist. Note to screenplay writers, if you have to explain it that much it's crap. The language in the film was also ridiculous, I lost count of how many time the f-word was used. I understand throwing that out for effect at times in a movie but when it gets used 3 times per minute it loses its punch.

The bottom line:
This movie completely sucks! It would have been great if they had done what was in the trailer and not tried to add something that wasn't there. Let's face it, unseen plot twists used as a punchline at the end of a movie are rarely perfected. Examples of this art can be seen in the aforementioned Sixth Sense (Bruce Willis stars) and also the movie Primal Fear (Edward Norton stars). That's how you pull off the mental bomb at the end of a movie instead of just making your movie a bomb by crapping it up.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Primal Fear was a good movie. But as good as the movie was, the book was even better. There were also sequels to the book Primal Fear which quite good as well.

I don't know how else to say this except - Halle Berry sucks as an actress. I have never seen her in one movie that would make me think of her as a credible actress. I love Bruce Willis, but wouldn't touch this movie because of her.