Bruce Willis as an action hero is so yesterday. These days it’s all about Willis playing the villain. He further cements his status as a creepy killer who’ll make you afraid to sleep at night by playing, well, a creepy killer in “”Perfect Stranger.””

Rowena Price (Halle Berry) is a hard-hitting journalist who will do anything to get the big story. That includes pretending to be a lobbyist so she can bust into the office of a senator, accuse him of having sex with an intern and then catch him on tape trying to bribe her to kill the story. Just like the way things work in the real world, the senator pulls the corporate strings of the newspaper to get the story cut. Price then becomes a woman without a story or a job.

While she’s wandering around the streets of New York in a drunken depression, she bumps into a new story. Her old friend Grace had an affair with high-powered ad agency executive Harrison Hill (Willis) and wants to blackmail him. But a week later her friend turns up dead in the bottom of a lake. It seems pretty obvious to Price that the killer had to be Hill, who must have killed her to keep her from telling his wife.

The next part of the plot proceeds like an X-rated version of “”You Got Mail.”” Price decides that in order to catch Hill, she needs to get close to him. This means using instant-messaging to get his deep, dark, kinky secrets out the way that Grace did. As she infiltrates further into Hill’s world, she starts to wonder. Is Hill really the guy to blame? Could the killer even be her own friend Miles who likes watching her just a little too much? Can anybody be trusted?

The premise just seems a little gross. Berry having “”cyber relations”” with Willis? Even though Berry’s character is doing it to find out if Willis was her friend’s killer and not for pleasure, it’s painful to watch. Willis is too old to be having any role where he plays a romantic interest for someone like Berry. Willis asking Berry’s character if “”she’s turned on”” will have you cringing.

Sadly the two hours of plot prove to be a complete waste. The last five to ten minutes throw a complete curveball. Anything you thought you had understood is completely reversed.

Too bad the screenwriters didn’t spend as much time on the rest of the movie as they did on the last few minutes. A little bit of creepy music and dark, foreboding lighting wasn’t enough to establish any goose bumps or thrill without any action to back it up.