‘The Perfect Man’ is forgettable as a result of imperfect script
“The Perfect Man” is a tweener romantic comedy featuring dialogue so bad it actually could have been written by a 14-year-old.
“If ex-boyfriends were dollars, you’d be loaded by now,” Holly Hamilton (Hilary Duff) tells her frustrated-in-love mother, Jean, (Heather Locklear) after yet another love affair has gone south.
Holly knows what this means: Once again Mom will be packing up and starting over in another city. This movie is predicated on the idea that a woman who looks like Locklear and is not a serial killer can’t find and keep a good man.
That’s right. It’s science fiction.
The movie opens in Wichita, Kan., but quickly shifts to Brooklyn, N.Y., where Jean has found a new gig in a neighborhood bakery. She moves with Holly and her little sister into a spacious apartment that by New York standards would rent for $2,500 a month. They can afford it because this is the movies.
Starting anew at yet another school, Holly is befriended by Amy (Vanessa Lengies) and meets Amy’s bachelor uncle, Ben (Chris Noth), a restaurateur and seasoned man of the world.
Soon Mother Jean is poised to dive into another disastrous relationship, this time with an oafish breadmaker (Mike O’Malley) whose idea of a class date is a concert by a Styx tribute band. Facing yet another maternal meltdown and forced march to a new Zip Code, Holly decides on a pre-emptive strike.
She’ll invent a secret admirer, a suave, debonair, thoughtful lover who will ply Jean with flowers and poems and even chat with her on the Internet. With luck, Jean will be so distracted by this mystery man that Holly will be able to spend an entire semester in one place.
To implement her plan, Holly relies on Uncle Ben’s romantic expertise. He suggests that sending roses is a cliche: “When a woman gets an orchid, she feels she’s floating on a cloud of infinite possibilities.”
If you say so.
Before it’s all over Mom and Ben will hit it off, and Holly will find her first boyfriend (Ben Feldman). Who could have seen it coming?
“The Perfect Man” has been written (by Michael McQuown, Heather Robinson, Katherine Torpey and Gina Wendkos) and directed (by Mark Rosman) with a dispiriting lack of imagination. It may be the rare movie without even one original moment.
This is the first Hilary Duff performance I’ve watched all the way through, and by the end I was ready to strangle her. “The Perfect Man” is so instantly forgettable that not even shameless scene-stealer Carson Kressley (of TV’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”), here cast as a supremely fey bartender, is able to cut through the glop.