Review: The Perfect Guy
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 at 9:00PM 
Tim here. I have a fun game: describe the plot of The Perfect Guy to somebody. Better yet, see how much of the plot they can guess just from the title: Leah (Sanaa Lathan) is dating this really swell guy Dave (Morris Chestnut), but he absolutely refuses to commit, so she dumps him. Mere seconds later, or so it seems, she's met-cute with an even sweller guy, Carter (Michael Ealy) one who's so handsome that the whole movie seems to melt whenever he flashes his smoldering eyes and quiet smile, and who impresses the ever-loving hell out of her friends and family without even the smallest effort. He is, you might go so far as to say, the Perfect Guy.
Ah, but he has a violent streak, and when he takes it out on some hapless shmuck in front of our heroine, she decides to get out while the getting's good. And this turns the Perfect Guy into a Perfect Psychopath, and there will be much anguish and suffering, and much brow-furrowing from the wise but helpless cop (Holt McCallany) who wishes that the system wasn't so rigged against women in trouble, but is personally powerless to do anything but suggest in elliptical terms how she can take the law into her own hands.
So far, so clichéd, but that's not the game.
The game is that after the person has successfully teased out everything this brutally paint-by-numbers affair has in store for its audience, you lean in and mention that there is actually one thing that makes The Perfect Guy different from a thousand movies that had largely exhausted the possibilities of their genre by the middle of the 1990s: the leads are all African-American. Then lean back and enjoy the mixture of befuddlement and disappointment and despair jockeying for position on your listener's face.
It's a cockeyed form of equality, of course, that movies about and for and written by black people can occupy the same wide range of quality as white people movies. Still, it stings that on one of the rare occasions that actors like Lathan and Chestnut get a chance to take headlining roles in financially successful movies, they're offered such dumb, reductive roles. Lathan, in particular, is an actress of unusually potent screen presence whose filmography consists almost solely of wives and girlfriends.
Here, she does a good job of playing a simpering careerist with no clear ability to hold more than one thought in her head at a time (like that's any kind of achievement), and when the film makes its inexorable shift to transforming Leah into a somewhat unlikely action figure, she puts a frazzled, pissed-off spine into her performance that gives the last scenes more of a punch than they've really earned. Still, you can make the world's most artistic, complex, accomplished McDonald's cheeseburger, and still have a McDonald's cheeseburger to show for it.
That being said, who among us has not even once had the thought, "hell yeah, McDonald's cheeseburger? And in that spirit, let us concede that The Perfect Guy is kind of delightful in its unrelenting tackiness. It's a garbage movie, absolutely and unequivocally, and Ealy's performance is hypnotically mis-aimed: he's like sexy robot capable of only one form of emotional expression who then has a Westworld-style breakdown, leaving that expression intact as he goes a-killin’. Watching Lathan try to force an emotional connection with him is as silly as it is inert, and the movie starts to pick up a gleeful momentum based largely around how hokey Ealy's portrayal of the seductive bad guy is. And also how mystifyingly director David M. Rosenthal and editor Joan Sobel piece together the film's chronology and even just the scene-to-scene pacing, including but not limited to an arbitrary system of fades to black every few scenes.
The result is a movie that's absolutely incompetent, but so very earnest in its incompetence that it's kind of sweet; endlessly tangled up in the most geriatric clichés of the erotic thriller, but so enthusiastic in its deployment of those clichés that it picks up some feisty energy. In order to connect points A and B, screenwriter Tyger Williams uses the thickest, boldest-colored markers he can scrounge up, so every single emotional beat and narrative signpost brays out like all the horns in the orchestra playing the same note at once.
Good? Lord, no. Successful? Eh, not really. It's pretty stupid and terrible, but it has the fearlessness of a middleweight talent show competitor who will get through this routine, by God, no matter how obviously things are falling apart. And that keeps things amusingly frantic, at least, so that's something. Something awful, but also zippy and zesty in its awfulness.
Rating: C-
Reader Comments (7)
Now I really want to see that movie.
Seems like campy fun like Jlo's The Boy Next Door,the next thriller from the makers will be called Unforgettable with Heigl as the e wife from hell and Rosario Dawson as the new fiancee.
I want so much more for Sanaa Lathan than a film as schlocky as this appears to be, but I'll rejoice for her having a number one box-office hit. Here's hoping it makes Hollywood take more notice.
Ah, but Tim, let us not forget Obsessed, which, in addition to bearing very nearly the same plot, wasted the talents of none other than Beyonce and Idris Elba! (And, uh, Ali Larter and Jerry O'Connell were there.) It's a camp classic that I love to put on just to see the baffled reactions on my friends' faces.
Tim, oh, how do you do it, you crafty sorcerer you? Your entertaining reviews always make me want to see bad movies.
The Perfect Guy is not the camp fest one would hope. It simply is a mediocre movie based on a tired premise.
It sounds like Zoo. Mind-numbingly stupid, but I couldn't stop watching because all the animal attacks are HILARIOUS.