The Perfect Guy

The boyfriend-from-hell thriller 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 stars as Leah, a 36-year-old political lobbyist whose charming new boyfriend turns out to be a psychotic stalker. Director David M. 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. Only Lathan's earnestness 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.