There’s nothing like a gripping, tightly plotted, sharply written murder mystery to stir body and mind. And – surprise, surprise - Perfect Stranger is nothing like a gripping, tightly plotted, sharply written murder mystery.

Following Catwoman and Gothika, Halle Berry keeps up the dud work as Rowena Price, an investigative reporter with a penchant for false identities.

Rowena is upset. Not only has her latest scoop been shelved, but the poisoned corpse of her old acquaintance Grace has just washed up from the Hudson.

A mere week ago, they’d been talking about Grace’s affair with a certain Harrison Hill - not he of the Television Burp, but New York’s most aggressive advertising mogul (played by Willis at maximum smirk).

Before you can say "what happened to journalistic objectivity?", Rowena sets about exposing Hill as the culprit.

"All it takes to commit a murder are the right ingredients at the right time," she tells her computer-savvy friend and colleague Miles (the ever-creepy Ribisi). Being utterly smitten, he laps up this meaningless claptrap.

Her task is made easier by Hill’s hands-on approach to both his work and female employees – captain of industry; commander-in-chief of indiscretion.

By day, she poses as ‘Katherine’, a temp at the old horndog’s ad agency. By night, she massages his e-malehood as chatroom temptress Veronica.

Drifting round the edges of this who-cares-whodunit are Hill’s mega-rich wife, his frosty lesbian assistant, Rowena’s sometime boyfriend, and the agency’s resident gossipmonger who vacates the film after delivering lines like "She’s his watchdog, not his bitch."

Interminable conversations by email pitch the whole sorry misadventure into an abyss of apathy, from which not even a murky backstory about child abuse or numerous shots of Berry’s tush can save us.

Director Foley once made fine, hard-boiled movies like After Dark, My Sweet and Glengarry Glen Ross, but he’s clearly gone soft in the head.

Willis also has his daftest half-hour since 1994’s Color Of Night in a suspense-free debacle saddled with dialogue naffer than Basic Instinct 2 and an ending as ludicrous as the phrase ‘Oscar-winner Halle Berry’.

Elliott Noble