Review: The Perfect Guy

Tim here. I have a fun game: describe the plot of The Perfect Guy to somebody. Better yet, see how much of the plot they can guess just from the title: Leah (Sanaa Lathan) is dating this really swell guy Dave (Morris Chestnut), but he absolutely refuses to commit, so she dumps him. Mere seconds later, or so it seems, she's met-cute with an even sweller guy, Carter (Michael Ealy) one who's so handsome that the whole movie seems to melt whenever he flashes his smoldering eyes and quiet smile, and who impresses the ever-loving hell out of her friends and family without even the smallest effort. He is, you might go so far as to say, the Perfect Guy.

Ah, but he has a violent streak, and when he takes it out on some hapless shmuck in front of our heroine, she decides to get out while the getting's good. And this turns the Perfect Guy into a Perfect Psychopath, and there will be much anguish and suffering, and much brow-furrowing from the wise but helpless cop (Holt McCallany) who wishes that the system wasn't so rigged against women in trouble, but is personally powerless to do anything but suggest in elliptical terms how she can take the law into her own hands.

So far, so clichéd, but that's not the game.

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Box Office: A perfect guy comes for a visit

Tim here with your box office report for this quiet autumn weekend. Or not. In fact, coming on the heels of a fairly slow August and and absolutely soporific Labor Day, this weekend was kind of unbelievably big, with both of the week's major releases managing to overperform quite a bit beyond all but the very rosiest of expectations. It was a photo finish to see who ended up in the #1 slot

WEEKEND TOP 10, ESTIMATED
01 The Perfect Guy $26.7 new
02 The Visit $25.7 new
03 War Room $7.4 (cum. $39.2)
04 A Walk in the Woods $4.6 (cum. $19.9) Reviewed at Sundance
05 Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation $4.2 (cum. $188.2) Tim's Review
06 Straight Outta Compton $4.1 (cum. $155.7) Podcast
07 No Escape $2.9 (cum. $24.2)
08 The Transporter Refueled $2.7 (cum. $13.3)
09 90 Minutes in Heaven $2.2 new
10 Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos $1.9 (cum. $6.7)

That's quite an achievement for both of the top openers. The Perfect Guy becomes the third film with African-American leads in a row, over five consecutive weeks, to take the #1 spot. Before we get too excited about the nascent sea change in American pop culture, it should be pointed out that next week, all of those films are going to be beaten by, among other releases, a movie in which Johnny Depp plays a character with the actual name "Whitey". Still, it's a stark reminder that there's a big audience for movies where the cast isn't all full of Nordic gods, and maybe that audience would even be around anytime that's not the hinterlands of early September.

The other release, The Visit, meanwhile finds famous and infamous thriller-maker M. Night Shyamalan being handed the keys to maybe, perhaps, let himself out of director jail. The film received less than luminous reviews, but they still look  rosy and loving compared to his recent spate of much-despised misfires: 56 on Metacritic, and 62% on Rotten Tomatoes, Shyamalan's first Fresh movie since 2002's Signs. Moreover, produced on a shoestring, apparently with much of the director's own money, The Visit has already turned a profit. No, it's not The Sixth Sense, but it's a definite upswing in Shyamalan's fortunes any way you look at it.

For myself, I've seen neither of them, though I did finally catch up with Straight Outta Compton this weekend. Since I'm boring, let me kick it over to the audience: What did you watch this weekend?