Fatal detraction

While film critics spent last weekend making goo-goo eyes at an M. Night Shyamalan-directed found-footage horror movie, David M. Rosenthal’s gangly and rote thriller The Perfect Guy swooped in to top the domestic box office. The Perfect Guy is barely a professional effort, and frequently veers in to the lane of lurid trash, but its depiction of white-collar African-Americans is an extreme rarity in the cinema, and the film serves a woefully underserved audience. Too bad it’s a total dud.

Sanaa Lathan (The Best Man films) stars as Leah, a 36 year-old political lobbyist who worries that the clock is ticking on marriage and motherhood. A black businesswoman over 30, strong, complex, beautiful, serious and uncompromising, Leah is the sort of character that you only see on movie screens in trash like The Perfect Guy. It’s no wonder that the best black actresses are finding their meatiest roles on the small screen these days.

Tyger Williams penned the script, his first screen credit since writing 1993’s Menace II Society, but don’t expect any of that film’s bold, intense style. Instead, Rosenthal (A Single Shot) and his cinematographer Peter Simonite aim for a high-gloss veneer, basically going for a Tyler Perry drama with less hand-of-God sermonizing, and it mostly feels like they’re trying to replicate the work of more accomplished genre filmmakers.

When her live-in boyfriend Dave (Morris Chestnut) refuses to propose, Leah breaks off their relationship and recommits to her career. Enter Carter (Michael Ealy), a handsome and seemingly “perfect” cocktail of charm, strength, chivalry, sensitivity and success (this film’s concept of “the perfect guy” also drags women into nightclub bathrooms to engage in unprotected sex, because it was written and directed by men). Carter fixates on Leah with a low, loving gaze that can easily turn sinister, and while that rabid puppy-dog stare might be the film’s best weapon, Ealy is never allowed to dig beyond Carter’s surface.

Carter is suave and savvy enough to win over Leah’s friends and wrap her religious mother and overprotective father (always nice to see you, Charles S. Dutton!) around his finger, but he also shows a violent side, causing Leah to recoil and break away. This drives Carter crazy, and despite her protests, he refuses to leave Leah alone, calling and texting at all hours and following her everywhere. It starts off creepy and grows increasingly invasive and violent, escalating into full Fatal Attraction mode when Dave comes back into the picture.

Rosenthal proves pretty inept at building suspense, and every attempt at a “thriller moment” falls short. The third act is needlessly distended—it doesn’t tie up loose ends so much as it double-knots ends that had already been tied—and the dialogue is clunky beyond belief. (“A lobbyist, eh? I guess you’re well-practiced in the art of persuasion.”) Lathan’s earnestness is the only thing that holds the film together—she’s so good while being given so little to work with, it’s a crime that she isn’t headlining better films than this one.