James Foley is an intriguing director whose Glengarry Glen Ross and At Close Range proved he could make far better films than this silly if stylish erotic thriller.

It stars Halle Berry as a slightly unlikely ace reporter who is taken off a good story when a guilty gay Senator applies pressure on her editor and then gets embroiled in another, more personal case.

A girlfriend of hers, the internet chum of Bruce Willis's equally unlikely advertising ace, is murdered and she joins Willis's firm to test his errant sexuality for herself.

He falls for the hook as she and her tech-savvy friend (Giovanni Ribisi) set trap after internet trap. But things are not at all what they seem. The plot whisks us this way and that with some resource but very little veracity - Foley's direction is smart, but his story really isn't, and both Berry and particularly Willis walk through it as if on hot bricks.

Apart from anything else, you have to be a bit of a geek to realise exactly what's going on; one sighs for some sensible conclusion which doesn't involve computers.

The advertised eroticism, by the way, is there but carefully suggested rather than openly displayed. Perhaps a strenuous bout of simulated sex might have come dangerously close to knocking Willis's strangelooking hairpiece agley.