If the 2004 film “Catwoman” had a point, it was to prove there is a limit to what people are willing to watch Halle Berry do. Purring like a cat for two hours is beyond this point. And if “Perfect Stranger” is any indication, so is solving a bad murder mystery.

Here Ms. Berry plays Rowena, a hot investigative reporter at the New York Courier who gets off on role-play, entrapment, and Internet chats. It is unclear why Ms. Berry has been cast as a journalist, since she seems to think being a reporter involves making up identities, lying, and lots of costume changes. But what Rowena lacks in credentials she makes up for with the heavy use of a newsboy cap.

For reasons unknown, Rowena writes under the pseudonym David Shane, through which she has made a living out of uncovering the hypocrisy of powerful men. When her friend Grace (Nicki Aycox) turns up dead in the Hudson, Rowena decides to go after Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), the ad executive with whom Grace was having an affair. With the help of her mildly psychotic yet adorable co-worker, Miles (Giovanni Ribisi, impressively proving that there is little we wouldn’t like to see him do), Rowena creates a fake identity and gets a job as a temp at Hill’s ad agency. Using herself as bait, Rowena plans to solve the murder of her friend, since the police don’t seem to care much how it happened. You’ll never guess that our fair heroine gets more than she bargained for.

With lives sponsored by Victoria’s Secret, Reebok, Heineken, and Starbucks, the entire film fails the plausibility test. Rowena’s glamorous life as a tabloid reporter has earned her an unbelievably spacious apartment on the Upper West Side. And while it defies logic that Rowena would keep a spare key under her doormat in New York City, it is just cinematic laziness to suppose that Miles, who makes a living uncovering personal information through online loopholes, would leave a spare above his doorjamb.

Still fascinated with the technology of the 1990s, “Perfect Stranger” delves into the world of online chat rooms and the newfangled notion that people online are not who they say they are. Have not we progressed past this point?

Director James Foley, who oversaw Mark Wahlberg in 1996’s often unintentionally amazing “Fear,” seems to think that a thriller can be made from making Ms. Berry sachet, shimmy, and flirt. Interspersed within the plot’s various red herrings and potholes are montages showing stock shower scenes, faucets menacingly starting, and threatening male voices accompanied by loud music.

No one in the film is above suspicion, but no one is very interesting, either. For a genius executive/potential murderer, Hill sure is stupid about his online liaisons. Rowena is intended to be similarly smart, but she clearly slept through the entire dot-com era and all those Take Back the Night marches in college. She has allowed her friend Miles to develop a disturbing crush on her and continues to sleep with a man who impregnated her dead friend, a scenario that seems concocted solely to make sure someone has sex with Ms. Berry before the credits roll.

The result is a film suffering from the soft bigotry of limitless permutations. The final cliffhangers are tedious in their successive implausibility and it’s clear that the ending is but one of the various and thoughtless conclusions that were dreamed up. Worst of all is that given the ending Mr. Foley chose, had Rowena never begun her investigation, the cause of Grace’s death may never have been revealed. Aside from Grace, everyone would have been far better off.

mkeane@nysun.com