In theaters

PERFECT STRANGER, directed by James Foley, written by Todd Komarnicki, 109 minutes, rated R.

The new James Foley movie, “Perfect Stranger,” stars Halle Berry as a questionable journalist caught in a sensationally stupid plot.

The film is another one of those glossy, manufactured thrillers that exist to generate a final twist that’s so unexpected, the film must wend back through key plot points to prove that nobody in the audience was misled along the way.

Last year’s “The Prestige” is a recent example of a movie that did this well; you left the theater with admiration for the film’s slick sleight-of-hand. But in “Perfect Stranger,” when the big reveal comes, you pause over your pail of Pepsi and realize that not only have you been had, but that the filmmakers got only half the title right.

After nearly two hours, it’s clear you never knew anyone in this movie.

The film stars Berry as, well, any number of people. As the story begins, she’s Rowena Price, a reporter for The New York Courier who once skewered the cheaters and liars of the world under a male pseudonym. When Ro is screwed out of a running story she “worked on for six months,” she quits the paper and finds work in her past.

Her old friend, Grace (Nicki Aycox), has appeared with an agenda – investigate Grace’s former lover, Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), the hugely successful and very married media mogul who keeps an apartment on the sly so he can bed his share of women.

When Grace suddenly winds up dead, Ro believes Hill might be the murderer and thus finds herself working the case with the help of her former newspaper colleague Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), a tech geek whose attraction to Ro goes deeper than mere friendship.

What ensues feels like stock footage culled from other, better thrillers, with the undeniably beautiful and talented Berry following her fellow actors in trying to connect to a movie whose storyline splits and frays.

In an effort to learn more about Hill, Ro transforms herself into Katherine Pogue, a fetching temporary worker with a killer wardrobe designed to show off her killer body, and infiltrates his organization.

This leads to a potentially deadly flirtation with Hill, who spends his days talking dirty in Internet chat rooms, about which Ro, a seasoned journalist, apparently never knew existed.

Perhaps the world is a perfect stranger to her – or at least it is to the film’s screenwriter, Todd Komarnicki.

Anyway, with Miles’ help, Ro morphs into Veronica, and the web she weaves on the Web with Hill helps set the movie up for its stunner of an ending.

And it is a stunner, so much so that it shocks you out of the moment and into reality, where the film doesn’t exist, though where the ability to reason can flourish.

Although the movie makes a case for its ending, taking you by the hand and walking you through the stink of all its red herrings, the effort is wasted. Ro sounds like roe for a reason, and the logic behind this film was fishy from the start.

Grade: C-

On DVD

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, directed by Kevin Macdonald, written by Peter Morgan and Jeremy Block, 121 minutes, rated R.

Kevin Macdonald’s “The Last King of Scotland” is based on Giles Foden’s novel, which was inspired by true events and which certainly took its liberties in telling them. The movie follows suit.

Much like Stephen Frears’ “The Queen,” a good deal of “Scotland” is speculative, especially its dialogue, which for the most part is hooked to one colorful imagination.

The movie mixes entertaining cutaways and asides with the deepening horror you’d expect from a story focused on the reign of Gen. Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker), the Ugandan dictator who dazzled a nation with his charm before murdering more than 300,000 people during his eight-year tyrannical rule.

The film views Amin through the eyes of its white protagonist, a naive Scottish doctor who never existed. His name is Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), and in 1971, fresh from university, he left his life of wealth and privilege for the drama of Uganda.

There, he allegedly was going to sow his wild oats and find himself while helping the poor and the stricken. That’s a familiar story to tell, perhaps bordering on cliche, with Africa once again used as the go-to place for the white man’s spiritual awakening and salvation.

The good news is that Macdonald, his screenwriters and his cast work hard to tell it well, with the story following Nicholas’ move into the Amin compound to become his personal physician and closest confidant.

Let the sweet life begin, with Nicholas riding a high, comfortable life that gradually dissolves into nightmare as the Amin regime falls apart along with the man himself.

In his Academy Award-winning performance, Whitaker is the reason to see the movie, which nearly rises to the power of what he achieves here.

Assisted by his intimidating bulk, monstrous sneer and bulging right eye, what the actor shows us is a complex portrait of a man whose wide smile and hearty laugh could snap into a murderous rage if provoked. In this respect, he recalls Brando – there is surprise in his step, with a curtain of menace running beneath it.

His was one of the fiercest, least predictable performances of 2006, so fully on edge that he becomes the movie’s edge.

Grade: B+

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays and Fridays in Lifestyle, weekends in Television and at bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.