The Perfect Guy

If I may be upfront, The Perfect Guy is slickly made, and features performances that are much better than it probably deserves.  If only the script by Tyger Williams (whose last credited screenplay was 1993's Menace II Society) was able to up its game.  This is a movie where all the characters know they're in a domestic thriller, and act according to the rules of the genre.  Nobody's rocking the boat here, and so while the movie is better made than we expect, it simply doesn't excite.

If you want an example of a domestic thriller that not only knows how to play by the rules but also shakes them up, may I suggest The Gift, a little movie that came out a month ago, and is much better than this in just about every category you can think of.  Both of the movies are revenge thrillers where a person is let into someone else's life, and becomes overcome with obsession.  But The Gift has some brilliant twists that not only throw us off, but changes the rules of the game halfway through the film, and even changes how we view certain characters.  This movie follows the cliches of the genre right to the letter, so you could feasibly walk out of the theater for a half hour at any point in the film, walk back in, and amaze other audience members by being able to guess just about everything that happened in the film while you were out.  The Perfect Guy slavishly follows our expectations, which just doesn't cut it when another recent movie did such a great job surpassing them.  The actors and the direction by David M. Rosenthal deserve to be in a better movie.

The plot involves Leah (played by a very likable Sanaa Lathan), a successful career woman who has been dating the handsome Dave (Morris Chestnut) for the past two years.  They have an argument early in the film - She's 36-years-old, and is ready for marriage and kids before she's too old to truly enjoy it.  He knows he loves her, but doesn't want to make that kind of commitment yet, because there's a lot of divorce and heartbreak in his family.  They break up, and two months later, Leah has a run-in with the charming and polite Carter (Michael Ealy) at a bar.  They instantly hit it off, and as they spend more time together, Leah is clearly falling head over heels for the guy.  She introduces him to her best friends and even her parents, whom he is able to charm with equal ease.  This is the best part of the movie, as Lathan and Ealy have an easy screen chemistry together, and the movie even manages to have a sense of humor about itself during these scenes.  But, we know walking in that this is a thriller, and this can't last.

Indeed, immediately after the weekend at Leah's parents, they make a stop at a gas station, and when a random stranger walks up to Leah to ask her an innocent question (he's interested in her car, and wants to know more about it), Carter suddenly flips out and nearly beats the guy to a bloody pulp just for talking to her.  Carter the charming and sensitive young man makes an instant switch to Carter the psychotic and abusive melodramatic bully.  Leah talks about the change in his behavior to one of her friends, and says it was "like a switch that went off".  I say Carter knows that he's the heavy in a domestic thriller, and acts according to the rules of his character type.  At least Leah is smart enough to break things off with the creep, instead of giving him numerous chances like some heroines in these movies do.  But, the guy just won't take the hint.  He stalks her, he leaves ominous notes on her car door ("If I can't have you, no one will..."), he breaks into her house and installs hidden cameras so that he can watch her from his hi-tech computer set up at home, and the dirty cad even goes so far as to steal her cat.

Leah gets a restraining order, but it doesn't seem to do much good.  She turns to a police detective (Holt McCallany), who is sympathetic, but can do little without evidence.  Around this time, Leah and Dave start patching things up and want to try again with their relationship.  This does not bode well for Dave when Carter finds out about their relationship.  After all, we see what Carter does to the sweet old lady who lives across the street from Leah when she starts snooping around.  From there, the movie follows in lockstep with the dozens of others just like it.  Yes, the actors are enjoyable and give their characters more personality than they probably had in the script.  And yes, the movie is handsomely shot.  But what does any of that matter when the material is so generic?  It doesn't even allow Carter to have a slow descent into obsessive madness.  He just suddenly turns into a creepy and murderous stalker at the drop of a hat.  Are there guys who obsess over women this way in real life?  Of course.  But I highly doubt they spend every second of every day lurking in the shadows, and suddenly popping up behind their victims like the villain in a mad slasher movie.

The Perfect Guy is easy enough to watch, but while I was watching it, I couldn't help but wonder what it could have been if it dared to break away from what we anticipated.  The potential is there, but it never takes it.  Instead we get scenes and dialogue that seem lifted from other films, right down to the climax, which feels like a cheap and quick solution to the problem the main character is facing.  Even the film's final shot is a predictable cliche, and the movie should have cut to the end credits before it popped up.  At least that would have been something different.

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