THE PERFECT GUY (David M. Rosenthal). 100 minutes. Now playing. Rating: N
Where to watch: iTunes
Halfway through, The Perfect Guy flips from bland romance to a weak woman-in-peril suspenser. It’s so perfectly predictable that some of the almost all-female audience giggled all the way through and called out dialogue lines before they were spoken on screen.
Protagonist Leah (Sanaa Lathan) has a near-perfect upwardly middle-class life: good job, supportive girlfriends, loving parents and a house so professionally decorated that it looks like no one lives there. The only flaw is that her otherwise ideal boyfriend (Morris Chestnut) is stalling on marriage and ambivalent about having kids. So she dumps him and takes up with the titular perfect guy (Michael Ealy), who turns out to be a violent obsessive. Tame stalking, harassment and murders draw a few faint gasps from the non-giggling portion of the audience.
The actors take the material seriously, but they’re sabotaged by a weak script and an apparent commitment on the part of director David M. Rosenthal to play down the action as much as possible and keep the visuals – actors included – looking like a department-store catalogue.
