Air humping in leg warmers meets journalistic malfeasance and everyone's lives are ruined. But hey! Jaime Lee is hot, so I guess that's ok.
Hailed as the film that ended Travolta's career (briefly, lets be honest) and set Jamie Lee back a few years, Perfect is anything but. Its way too long for such a paper thin plot and is stuffed with repeated unnecessary and irrelevant scenes that keep it dragging you into the depths of your sofa. Pedantic would be an understatement. But poorly acted is not how we would describe it. At worst, the acting is "meh", "whatevs" levels aside from Jaime Lee who is pretty darn good here. Even Travolta who we love to bash on did just fine. It's not the actors who are at fault here.
What IS wild about this is how heavily involved Rolling Stones magazine is, while also managing to paint the rag in a very bad light. Its somehow screaming out to us in 1985 "WE DON'T ACTUALLY DO GOOD JOURNALISM! DON'T TRUST US!". At no point, would I have wanted to place a subscription after watching this so...good job?
The plot is baffling and falls into the nonsensical realm of stinkers. Its border-line idiot plot, but also manages to make zero sense and is clear that no one involved knew anything about either federal espionage law, the FISA act, or subpoenas. Yes I know that maybe the majority of Americans don't but we aren't writing movies about that material either. A lot of the film's dumbness could have been avoided with just a single call to an attorney.
Lastly, the film manages to step on its own John Thomas. In the climax of their relationship, Jamie Lee's Jesse Wilson deletes the article that Travolta's Adam Lawrence was writing (poorly) about gym life and how his main focus is a sexually liberated Linda who uses the gym as a place to meet dudes, in her endless pursuit of perfection. Jesse declares it will ruin her life just like a reporter once ruined her own - EXCEPT Jesse has never even met Linda from what we know AND Linda wanted the article to be exactly about that part of her life. The whole thing could have been a statement article on the decade and changed Linda's life for the better but instead Jesse destroys the whole thing (except she never saved the file on the 1985 word processor - oops) and everyone's future along with it and we're supposed to appreciate her position?!?! No she had the power to change LA and thus America's viewpoint of women and what a woman should be, likely allowing Harvey Weinstein 30 years in the business. #metoo could have happened 20 years earlier (saving a lot of people a lot of pain) if stupid Jesse had just kept her grubby little mitts off Adams work. But then Adam does something equally terrible - he rewrites the story as a fluff piece just to get back in Jesse's drawers. He should know better than Jesse about what the repercussions of that original article would have done but instead trashes the whole thing so he could get some gym rat ass. And that's worse that Jesse's actions - she's just a gym instructor. He's a crummy Ben Fong-Torres. Save America? Nah, sweet sweet leotard's crumpled by the bed for Adam!
The movie sucks. Skip it.
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