David M. Rosenthal’s The Perfect Guy is an erotic thriller without eroticism or thrills. There was a time in America when cheap Fatal Attraction knockoffs like this invaded video stores and late night cable programming with something of a fervency, ensuring that a generation of high school males would have easy access to innumerable scenes of heaving breasts and soft-core rumpy-pumpy. I would go so far as to posit that the singular function of films like The Perfect Guy was to serve as a delivery vehicle for nudity and sleazy thrills. The Perfect Guy is rated PG-13, features only two (largely obscured) sex scenes, and is missing the soft-focus, Zalman King imprimatur of sleaze that it requires to justify its existence. Say what you will about this year’s rock-stupid The Boy Next Door, at least it had the decency to be indecent.
Sanaa Lathan plays Leah, a woman who works in a vaguely defined political office, and who has lost patience with her marriage-phobic boyfriend Dave (Morris Chestnut). After dumping the poor dope, Leah immediately begins having run-ins with the ultra-handsome Carter (the ultra-handsome Michael Ealy), who quickly becomes her ideal boyfriend. Carter is, as the high-school-ready title would announce, the perfect guy. He pays attention to her, he buys her flowers, he courts her parents (Charles S. Dutton appears as a baseball-obsessed dad).
Screen Gems
Until one evening when Carter trashes a dude at a gas station for deigning to speak to her. From there, The Perfect Guy spirals into deeper and deeper levels of overwrought stupidity, as Carter reveals himself to be a sweating, shirtless, camera-planting, e-mail-hacking stalker. Check your watch. It’ll be about 50 minutes before the inevitable shotgun confrontation. In the meantime, we’re treated to scene after head-pounding scene of stultifying dialogue, leery closeups, and clueless cops (represented by Holt McCallany, his real name) who are unable to help.
The Perfect Guy is witless, graceless, and juvenile. It reads like a 14-year-old girl’s assumed representation of adult life. It’s high melodrama in the worst possible way, featuring hammy acting, hammy directing, and the hammiest of music; In one amusingly bad scene, Chestnut confronts Ealy in a bar. Note that the diagetic music from within the scene ceases to accommodate their conversation. My moviegoing companion noted that the scene could have been placed wholesale into an episode of Police Squad!
To compound the idiotic screenplay, The Perfect Guy is edited bluntly and furiously, leaving the most casual scenes feeling choppy and incomplete. It also seems to be filmed through a strange milky filter that leaves the images bland, colorless, and indistinct. This is an unattractive movie. Which is a marvel, seeing as it stars such attractive leads.
Screen Gems
There is a certain joy to be taken from thick-headed sex films like The Perfect Guy; sometimes prurient idiocy is the perfect way to pass the time. And I must admit to having a hearty, deep-bellied chuckle at my midnight screening, surrounded by chatty drunks and lovers of camp. But the greater pleasures of the genre typically come from more sexual channels: I ordered a heaping helping of nudity and violence, thank you. A single scene of Sanaa Lathan and Michael Ealy getting it on in a filthy, filthy public restroom is not enough (and seriously, those two should get tetanus shots after rubbing their bare buttocks on that rusty sink). Is it enough to laugh at such an awful film? Not this time.
There has been a recent trend of sex-leaning-yet-neutered erotic thrillers starring African American casts, from N-Secure to Obsessed to No Good Deed to the truly daffy Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor. These are simplified, moralizing, melodramatic movies that bank on exploitation tropes, but rarely have the moxie to actually go balls-to-the-wall, so to speak. When taken as a whole, one may find a certain degree of ironic, camp-loving satisfaction. Individually, however, they’re largely dumb.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
