Translated material
Side instinct
“The Perfect Stranger” on Moscow screens
Journalist Rowena (Halle Berry), specializing in "fried" materials, is forced to conduct an independent investigation into the murder of her friend. Shortly before her death, she began an affair with influential businessman Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), and her email is full of unambiguous messages from a stranger who may very likely turn out to be Hill, the killer, or both at the same time. In order to understand what is happening, Rowena gets a job in Hill's company, and at the same time plunges into the world of erotic online correspondence...All of the above could look more or less adequate only in one place - on the back of the box of a video cassette with a third-rate erotic thriller from the mid-90s, which never made it to the wide screen. Nevertheless, this is a fairly complete summary of the new film with the participation of Hollywood stars of the first magnitude, which simultaneously launched on a very significant number of screens around the world.
It's quite difficult to explain. More recently, it seemed that there was nowhere to go lower than the second “Basic Instinct” in the genre of film where crime and passion are mixed. But director James Foley (who at one time directed the excellent trash action movie with Madonna “Who’s That Girl?” and the powerful legal tragedy “Glengarry Glenn Ross”, after which he turned into a diligent but absolutely undistinguished average) proved that there are no limits to perfection. It was necessary to manage in 2007 to build a plot around Internet correspondence, presenting it as if it were the latest achievement of human thought! But this is not so bad - the most important thing is that, whether online or in reality, the actions of all the characters without exception are filled with some kind of primitive stupidity and illogicality. It is known that the filmmakers filmed three different endings to this story, in each of which a different character turned out to be the killer. With the same success, there could have been thirty-three of these endings, so the viewer doesn’t care how it ends. There is no more or less “chemistry” between the characters, which turns what is happening on the screen into a completely hopeless farce - it seems that both Willis and Berry forgot that their filmography is now decorated with this picture even before filming ended. There’s no need to even mention suspense. Not a penny's worth of eroticism. Not a single memorable phrase in over an hour and a half. In general, what is called “hopelessness dot ru”.
The only thing that can excuse the creators of “The Perfect Stranger” is that the indignant viewers (in America on the first weekend the film started at number four on the charts with a disgraceful $11 million to its credit) simply did not understand their true intentions. There is a small but still possibility that Foley and company are in fact ferocious postmodernists and, when making The Stranger, they were not trying to create a blockbuster at all, but were constructing a simulacrum. A film that meticulously collected all the cliches of second-rate erotic thrillers, a kind of “very intense movie” that can then be handed over to the chamber of cinematic measures and weights as a lopsided standard of a genre that has long ago gone out of fashion.