After a long time, a good old-fashioned thriller - though cast in the
modern day world of online chats, firewalls and hacking. It's not the
greatest piece of cinema you've seen, but it's an engrossing watch and
keeps you guessing till the end.
No body in the library here and no nosy detective peering for clues
through a magnifying glass. Instead, we have the magnificent Halle Berry
as Rowena, the feisty journalist who has just done an exposé
on a slimy senator and now goes undercover to track the man who killed
her childhood friend. Her quest takes her to a glitzy ad agency run
by the oh-so-suave and in control Harrison Hill (the still fun-to-watch
Bruce Willis).
Aiding her in the job is colleague and drinking buddy Miles (Ribisi),
the fiendishly clever geek who not only lends her a shoulder to cry
on but also instructs her on how to inveigle Hill into seductive late
night chats.
There's blackmail, infidelity, sexual peccadilloes and lots of dark
edges in what is essentially a whodunit, but one that is multi-layered.
No one is quite what they seem in the overlapping worlds of the real
and the virtual, where the characters are sometimes distorted, sometimes
real as in a flawed mirror.
So, who did kill Grace, Rowena's friend who tells her one night at
the station about how she was taken for a ride by a rich ad guy she
met online? Grace is found brutally killed one night. And the needle
of suspicion points to...you guessed it Harrison Hill, the man with
the rich wife who has a penchant for chatting up girls online and who
is supremely successful.
Plenty of red herrings in this tale of constantly changing identities
and wondering who really is the perfect stranger - the man you know
so well or maybe the woman you don't know at all.
The good old twist in the tale at the end is what thrillers are all
about. Halle Berry looks good and is good as the sometimes flawed investigative
journalist hiding dark secrets from her childhood. Bruce Willis is a
delight to watch. He's visibly older and the wrinkles are much more
pronounced, but he's just right from the part. The scene stealer, however,
is Giovanni Ribisi as Miles who exercises such control over the narrative
of the film.
Good for an evening out in the theatre. Fun to keep guessing through
the entire duration. Don't expect anything too great and you won't feel
cheated. But do go watch.