Have you ever met someone who you didn't like at first but, after you made an effort, they kinda got your attention?

I had to make the effort with Perfect Stranger. It is not an easy movie to like. Its direction seems pedestrian, the camera-work and editing wanting, and the acting wasted. The characters are not very nice people, but not evil enough to be anti-heroes.

But let's work backwards. It has a killer ending. If you worked hard to follow the complex plot, your efforts pay off. That makes you feel good. Like listening to a person you can't get away from who has droned for an hour and a half and then suddenly what they are saying makes a warped kind of sense. The plot might be convoluted, but I have to admire the way it fits the horrible, cynical pieces together. An hour afterwards, it reminds me of old B-movies that you might dig up and pick little gems from their rotting carcass.

So what's it about? Well, it could be about anything - no, that's me being too disingenuous. It's a mystery thriller. A whodunnit. It has Halle Berry moving through several personas and Bruce Willis being quite disgusting and yet getting our sympathies. She's an investigative reporter. He's the head of an advertising agency. Then there's some fabulous shots from the newly-completed 7 World Trade Center, the first of the new buildings on the former WTC site. Look out for stunning wraparound views of Lower Manhattan, the Hudson River, and New Jersey.

Annoyingly, the film doesn't glamorise its strengths. A key early conversation between Halle Berry (Rowena) and her pal Grace is almost overpowered by the background noise of the subway trains. Almost, but not quite - are you paying attention? The views of New York are more impressive when you think back to them. But at the time we see them, we are trying to figure out what kind of game Harrison Hill is playing. Similarly, an early scene of outrage that could have grandstanded Berry's acting talents is subsumed into a very ordinary establishing shot. But condemn it early on at your peril. Dismiss it and you forego the enjoyment of a well-constructed mystery, even if it doesn't live up to the star ratings its big names might suggest. This film doesn't follow the 'good' rules, you long for something to spice it up. Some flashy camera-work, fancy edits maybe. Or something sexy with Halle Berry's legs? And you don't get much of that. Does the story have you by the balls yet? Probably not. "Stroke a man's (beep), you get him for one night - stroke his ego and you get him for life." Grace's comment only hits us after we leave the cinema. It might not be that simple, but Rowena, like any good journalist, only does 'sexy' here for effect.

Rowena's pal winds up dead. Very dead. Horribly, bloated, facelessly dead. At this point, I was still thinking how they 'should' have directed the movie to give it more impact. Later on, I appreciate the understated style. It also leaves you free to follow the plot more carefully than if you are having clues and red herrings rammed down your throat.

Rowena takes on another identity to get a job at Harrison Hill's agency, as well as some more online personas. The powerful Mr Hill seems to have been in everyone's pants (even though he has a genuinely stunning wife). Yet Willis plays the role with such honesty that we almost don't want him to get caught out. He might be a sleaze but Rowena's co-investigator, Miles, is a sleaze-ball of a different kind. Miles does online jiggery-pokery to find out stuff for Rowena. But he is also a different kind of twisted power-tripper and runs rings around her.

Perfect Stranger lulls us into moral condemnation. Its outlook of the world is totally cynical. "Show me a beautiful woman and I'll show you a man who's tired of (beep)ing her," confides a Hill employee to Berry. When you meet the perfect stranger do you assume the best? Or do you assume the worst?

"To a certain extent, everybody lives a double life," says Academy Award winner Halle Berry. "We're all complicated beings; we're different people all the time - for example, a woman might act differently at work than she does at home. We all hide something, even from our best friends. This movie highlights that and takes it to the next level, showing what we're capable of when we're forced to come to terms with it."

OK, we know that nothing and no-one is perfect, and we accept that they everyone and everything is 'packaged', right down to the Veronica Secret gift bag that the ad agency is giving away. But ultimately Perfect Stranger is packaged as carelessly as if it were wrapped in second-hand gift wrap. That makes it easy to dismiss. Or loathe. But its self-effacing, redeeming qualities are perhaps sufficient not to ignore. Mystery thriller geeks, get your ticket now, before it is condemned to obscurity.

(note - I have censored certain words from the quotes from the film for this site)

Perfect Stranger is at once the smartest and quite literally dumbest movie I've ever seen. I'm not certain it was directed by James Foley, who also made Glengary Glen Ross and two Fifty Shades movies to keep up that intelligent/imbecilic duality, and writers and Todd Komarnicki and Jon Bokenkamp, or if it was all loaded into an artificial intelligence and told the words neo noir, giallo and erotic thriller. This was the best that mid 2000s computer moviemaking got.

Rowena Price (Halle Berry) and her researcher/dick in glass Miles Haley (Giovanni Ribisi) have just been kicked off the biggest story of their careers because powerful men can do that. As she drunkenly stumbles home, her old friend Grace Clayton (Nicki Aycox) finds her in the subway and asks for help taking down the man she just broke up with, married ad executive Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), giving her pages after pages - don't print out the internet - of their sex chats.

Yes, this is a movie that hits two of my favorite genres: advertising movies and films in which technology is outdated on release.

Rowena goes undercover and gets a job at Harrison's company H2A, which is really owned by his rich artist wife Mia (Paula Miranda). So here's where I tell you that I've worked in advertising 27 years and no intern gets that access to their boss, even if she looks like Halle Berry, and the ad campaign that everyone is losing their minds over that H2A did for Victoria's Secret - "I know Victoria's Secret" - is the kind of work that gets killed before it even gets written on the wall of ideas that will soon get killed on the first day of the worst ideas.

It's about this time that I'm reminded that James Foley also directed one of my favorite lunatic films, Fear, a movie in which Marky Mark fingerblasts Reese Witherspoon to The Sundays on the soundtrack while they ride a rollercoaster.

This movie somehow tops that as Berry uses her advanced and antiquated computer to simulate Willis' voice on her computer so they can have the worst cybersex on the internet.

Back in October 2006, this movie took marketing to new levels, as Grace, Hil's lesbian bodyguard Josie and his wife all introduced blogs dating back to September 2006, along with YouTube videos of the actresses reading their blogs in character.

That is more future leaning than the shrine to Berry that shows up late in the film, which had to have been animated in 1997. This entire film is like a quest for Berry to make something worse than Catwoman and better than Monster's Ball and somehow pull both off flawlessly.

They shot three endings of this because they couldn't figure out what worked best. Can you imagine that? Of course, in true giallo fashion, they went with the least likely suspect, which is the one fact that makes me consider this movie a success. It's so audacious that again, I can't decide if it's the worst writing I've ever seen or the best. This movie confuses me so badly and I know I'll have to watch it again and either hate or like it this time.

PERFECT STRANGER is a fast-paced little crime mystery of a film that despite the innumerable sidebars of undeveloped information scattered throughout the script does manage to surprise the audience at the end. The movie seems to be a vehicle for the beautiful Halle Berry to show off her skills and other assets: Bruce Willis is billed as a co-star but his role is minor and unexpectedly underplayed - a nice little tour de force for the king of action flicks.

Berry plays a reporter with a man's nom de plume that allows her to uncover secrets of famous people for newsy stories. Once fired from her job for uncovering the deeds of a Senator who is promoted by her newspaper, she teams her good buddy Giovanni Ribisi, a wizard of information about the media and internet spying, and the two go after a wealthy ad executive (Bruce Willis) when the murder of one of Berry's old girlfriends stirs both her wrath and her own secret demons. The chase is on with Berry playing games of deceit backed by the skills of Ribisi. And just when the plot seems to have uncovered the murderer, then another line of story involving Ribisi and Berry explodes the audience's tracking of the crime with a rather good ending.

Berry is fine in her role as is Ribisi with his: Willis is not on the screen long enough to form an opinion, a fact that is actually rather a refreshing twist! The camera loves Berry in all her glamour and manages to turn sordid when the plot elements necessitate that. It is a fair evening's diversion and were it not for all the 'dropped ideas' that plead development, it would be a stronger thriller. Grady Harp