The Perfect Man

A teenager (Hilary Duff) sends anonymous love letters to her single mother (Heather Locklear) to forestall mom’s habit of uprooting the family every time a romance goes sour. This laughless comedy is tawdry on so many levels. For starters, isn’t the very idea of posing as a man and flirting online with your own mother just a teensy bit disgusting? Casting perky Locklear and adorable Duff can’t disguise that their characters are an irresponsible mother (disrupting her daughters’ lives on whim after whim) and a destructive teenager (vandalizing a restaurant and ruining a stranger’s wedding). All this is played for laughs in Gina Wendkos’ clunky, contrived script and Mark Rosman’s lurching direction. Many scenes from the previews aren’t in the film—a telltale sign of desperate last-minute tampering.