A very famous man once said that sincerity is everything. Once you learn to fake that, the rest is easy.
In this absolutely dire, lifeless and unutterably thrill-less thriller, Halle Berry plays an investigative journalist who, along with her close friend and tech genius Giovanni Ribisi, makes her living taking down powerful men. When one of her friends is murdered, she goes undercover working for Harrison Hill, played (?) by Bruce Willis, a powerful businessman who had been having an affair with the dead woman. There’s a solid movie in that synopsis. But that’s the only place it is; it certainly isn’t up there on the screen. The screenplay is dreadful, number one; it desperately wants to be a “tech” thriller, so it’s constantly going on about e-mail accounts and instant messengers and spyware and databases, but it’s clear the screenplay was written by people who had only a rudimentary understanding of most of this stuff. The dialogue is awful, even when you get past the ridiculously out of touch techie stuff. Foley’s direction is equally terrible. He has no idea how to really build a scene and so he’ll often just cut two or three together in a montage for no real reason. It’s been a while, honestly, since I’ve seen a movie where the editing jumped out at me as bad, but it’s really, really awful here. The performances? Well, look, Halle Berry is trying; she’s okay, but the script doesn’t give her a whole lot to work with here. I will go out on a limb here and say that I think Giovanni Ribisi is actually good here; it’s a very twitch and exterior performance and so some people will think it’s overdone and probably it is, but he finds a real sickness at the heart of his character and rolls with it, adding, in my opinion, layers that aren’t in the script. And what to say about Bruce Willis and his performance? Man, I’m willing to talk about it, if you can ******* find it. I mean, there’s coasting and then there’s sleep-walking and then there’s phoning it in and then there’s just barely being present which is what Willis is doing here. It’s one of his worst performances and that’s saying something. And there’s a scene between Willis and Berry where I’m pretty sure he isn’t actually there for her side of it. It’s a typical over-the-shoulder shot, but I do not believe that is actually the back of his head/shoulder. And that would be consistent with the rest of his performance here; he seems to barely care when the camera is on him, so when it’s on somebody else, I suspect he was not present. I mean, look, this movie is truly awful and it’s not even bad in an entertaining way, just in stupid ways. I suggest keeping this particular Stranger exactly that. ½ star.
tl;dr – lifeless, dull and utterly without thrills, this tech-thriller also doesn’t get the tech right; Bruce Willis is near career worst and the story is poorly told with horrible dialogue. ½ star.