The Perfect Guy – Film Review
Director: David M. Rosenthal
Starring: Sanaa Lathan, Michael Ealy and Morris Chestnut
Release Date: Out Now
Leah (Lathan), a successful young woman thinks she’s met the ideal man in Carter (Ealy) after breaking up with her boyfriend, Dave (Chestnut). But as time goes by, a deeply seeded sinister side to Carter reveals itself in ways that become a danger to Leah in The Perfect Guy.
It’s not often that you can just call it with a film so early into its running time. Yet it only takes a few minutes (if anything) for you to know what you’re in for with The Perfect Guy and that’s a rigid but very lazy job of a thriller.
It’s difficult to get into the problems with this film because it is, simply put, consistently mediocre. There are aspects of the film that aren’t actually problematic. For example, the cast are fine.
That is to say, they do their best with what is a painfully by-the-numbers script that is predictable, clichéd and plays everything completely on the surface.
Michael Ealy suffers the most as he is tasked with playing a supposedly complex and dangerous character with no real complexity and cartoonishly dangerous behaviour exhibited. Ealy is definitely an actor that is capable of providing an off-putting but charismatic performance (as he did it very well in the short lived TV series, Almost Human)
In fact, there is a sense of satire in his early scenes of the film, when he is merely playing the part of the perfect boyfriend, before his character begins to turn. Satire is too flattering a word however, as this element is most likely inferred and not implied.
That sense of parody is in every other element throughout the opening scenes, which play out in typical, melodramatic TV movie fashion. For this first half or so of the film, it just feels so much like a fake movie that would be shown within another movie. At least for this first half of the film, it knows where its going.
Yet the movie ultimately de-evolves into a frustratingly bad slasher-movie-wannabe, thriller.
A detail that typically isn’t worthy of bringing up in a review is the editing. But the editing here is poor. As said, this is not something you’d usually discuss as it is often utilized competently and therefore often unnoticeable.
Here, however, it’s just plain jarring.
There’s not much else to say other than that. This is an uninteresting film, irritating in every degree and feels too long, despite only clocking in at 100 minutes.
In the end, The Perfect Guy is a weakly executed, thinly developed, poorly titled and plainly bad thriller. Only ever reaching average levels in its peaking moments, it’s a movie maybe worth half watching while playing it on a TV in the background, but certainly not worth the price of admission in a cinema.
Score: 2/5
Written by Seamus Hanly
