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BY MAGGIE SCOTT

The only thing perfect about director James Foley’s new thriller “Perfect Stranger” is Halle Berry’s lovely face and form. Imperfections in Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay make it imperative that someone as easy-on-the-eyes as Ms. Berry is constantly on screen to bring viewers back from the brink of somnambulation.

A tossed salad of well-worn plot devices, the story has more blind alleys and dead ends than the basic premise and requisite surprise ending deserve or warrant. Providing distraction from the poorly developed mystery is sex in adulterous, obsessive, jealous and electronic forms.

Sex introduces us to the story’s heroine, Rowena Price (Berry), investigative reporter, who, as the film opens, is getting the goods for a front page tabloid feature on a “family values” senator and his relationship with a male intern. Since the New York Courier once supported the senator, the story gets pulled and Rowena is ordered to take a two week vacation.

Smelling a cover up, Rowena quits in a fury over “powerful men protecting powerful men.” Helping her cry in her beer is Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), a tech geek with the Courier. It’s obvious that Miles goes for Rowena in a big way, but he appears to just be Jimmy Olsen to her Lois Lane. When a woman who has been Rowena’s leading source for information about straying big wigs gets pulled out of the river, Rowena’s instincts for fact-gathering have a personal edge.

Grace (Nicki Aycox) was Rowena’s childhood neighbor. They have a personal connection that is referred to in dreams that pop up without rhyme or reason. The adult Grace was a woman who got around, helped considerably by the anonymous and secretive world of the internet. Rowena asks for Miles’s help harvesting Grace’s e-mails, from which she determines that Harrison Hill of Harrison Hill Advertising could be the prime suspect: “All it takes to commit murder is the right ingredients at the right time.”

One ingredient is a scorned woman threatening to blow the whistle on a man with a wealthy wife who isn’t tolerating two-timing. The other ingredients are poison, specifically belladonna; and womanizing, specifically Harrison (Bruce Willis) and any female that catches his eye. And, his eye is caught by the vision of Rowena, going by the name of Katherine Pogue, as a temp worker at H2A, pushing a coffee cart into the conference room while Harrison’s in the process of taking a big account away from a rival ad agency.

With nearly as sharp an eye for signs of disloyalty as for the ladies, Harrison is understandably on high alert when he discovers “Katherine” poking around his computer. The same computer he uses to engage in sexually compromising conversations with someone called “rocket girl.”

Rowena is hoping to get proof of Harrison and Grace’s on-line connection; and if pretending to be Rocket Girl or pretending to have a crush on the boss will get her closer to putting Harrison in jail, then she’s more than willing. While Miles is discovering the connection between Harrison and the belladonna that poisoned Grace, Rowena is discovering a disturbing connection between herself, Miles and Grace.

With who-done-it plot twists squeezed into the last five minutes, an imperfect movie comes to a perfectly strange ending. A Revolution Studios film, Columbia Pictures release, rated R for sexual content, nudity, some disturbing violent images and language.
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