"Perfect" is an ungainly fusion of two or three failed movies. It's a romance without chemistry between the leads, a legal saga without tension, and a drama about journalistic integrity without a single true note for anyone who has ever read a newspaper or magazine.
John Travolta is unbelievable as a journalist, but then so is his character. While doing an article for Rolling Stone about a businessman accused of drug dealing, Travolta also decides to write about the fitness fad sweeping the nation (mostly in the form of aerobics classes). Wouldn't the first story keep him busy enough? What kind of journalist writes in depth articles about drug dealing in the corporate world and... aerobics? An early idea for the article is that fitness clubs have become the singles' clubs of the 80s. The word "exposé" is bandied around. What is he exposing, exactly?
Travolta meets Jamie Lee Curtis, a fitness instructor, and wants to interview her for his story, but she is reluctant because she was "burnt" by a journalist once in the past, but then of course they fall in love, at least that's what the screenplay wants you to believe.
I didn't believe that there was any spark between them at all, and nor did I believe Travolta as a journalist. Just when they are starting to form a relationship, Curtis reads the article Travolta is writing and finds it unnecessarily cutting and scathing. She storms out, he tries to apologize, they make up, whatever. We're mostly okay with that cliché. The problem is believing that Travolta would right that stuff in the first place. It seems to come from nowhere. He was truly miscast in this role; an epitome of openness, warmth, charisma, insouciance when the role called for someone we could believe is wrestling with demons.
The unnecessary and pointless subplot about the drug dealing businessman, belatedly tied up in the film's bathetic "climax" pads this silly fluff piece out to almost two whole hours.
Was the movie trying to make fun of the fitness craze, the drive for "perfection", or was it trying to draw an audience from those same crazies, who might stop by the multiplex on their way home from spin class?
My guess is, they wanted to go for both, but the movie has nothing like the wit or skill required to satirize something, while also celebrating it.
John Travolta is unbelievable as a journalist, but then so is his character. While doing an article for Rolling Stone about a businessman accused of drug dealing, Travolta also decides to write about the fitness fad sweeping the nation (mostly in the form of aerobics classes). Wouldn't the first story keep him busy enough? What kind of journalist writes in depth articles about drug dealing in the corporate world and... aerobics? An early idea for the article is that fitness clubs have become the singles' clubs of the 80s. The word "exposé" is bandied around. What is he exposing, exactly?
Travolta meets Jamie Lee Curtis, a fitness instructor, and wants to interview her for his story, but she is reluctant because she was "burnt" by a journalist once in the past, but then of course they fall in love, at least that's what the screenplay wants you to believe.
I didn't believe that there was any spark between them at all, and nor did I believe Travolta as a journalist. Just when they are starting to form a relationship, Curtis reads the article Travolta is writing and finds it unnecessarily cutting and scathing. She storms out, he tries to apologize, they make up, whatever. We're mostly okay with that cliché. The problem is believing that Travolta would right that stuff in the first place. It seems to come from nowhere. He was truly miscast in this role; an epitome of openness, warmth, charisma, insouciance when the role called for someone we could believe is wrestling with demons.
The unnecessary and pointless subplot about the drug dealing businessman, belatedly tied up in the film's bathetic "climax" pads this silly fluff piece out to almost two whole hours.
Was the movie trying to make fun of the fitness craze, the drive for "perfection", or was it trying to draw an audience from those same crazies, who might stop by the multiplex on their way home from spin class?
My guess is, they wanted to go for both, but the movie has nothing like the wit or skill required to satirize something, while also celebrating it.