Alex Cross

 

Rob Cohen's Alex Cross wants to be a serious, edge of your seat thriller, but it's so lurid in its melodrama, it works better as unintentional comedy at times.  This is the kind of movie where the titular hero, a Detroit police detective, can walk into a crime scene, and immediately figure out everything that happened seconds after walking in.  The movie wants us to believe that Alex Cross has some kind of Sherlock Holmes-level of deduction, but given how he gets every fact right in a fraction of a second, I say he's cheating and read the script beforehand. 

Those with good memories probably remember that there have already been two Alex Cross film mysteries, based on a series of novels by James Patterson.  Those would be 1997's Kiss the Girls, and 2001's Along Came a Spider, both of which featured Morgan Freeman in the lead role.  This film serves as a reboot, or a prequel of sorts to the earlier films.  Tyler Perry (yes, the guy known for dressing in drag and a fat suit, and playing feisty Southern granny Madea in a series of movies) takes on the role of Alex this time around, and while I always admire an actor stepping out of his comfort zone and tackling new material, I don't know if Perry was the right choice.  His performance is rather bland here, and never convinces us that he's a street-hardened police detective.  He hams up the melodrama of just about every situation, earning more laughs during his serious scenes than sympathy from the audience.  The filmmakers obviously cast him, because of the large audience he usually attracts with his films.  It feels like stunt casting, rather than a genuine performance.

As the film opens, we get to see Alex Cross both on the job, as he chases down a perp in the film's opening action sequence, and as a family man, where he shares a home with his lovely, pregnant wife (Carmen Ejogo), two kids, and smart-mouthed elderly mother (Cicely Tyson).  Already the film has created an uncomfortable balance of police drama, and generic comedic family drama - the two tones clashing severely.  It becomes even more odd when we meet our villain, a skinny, tattooed masochist who calls himself Picasso (Matthew Fox), because he always leaves drawings at the scene of the crime that contain clues to his next murder.  In his introductory scene, he gains the trust of a wealthy woman after winning a mixed martial arts match, goes to her home, drugs her, murders all of her personal bodyguards, and then tortures her by cutting her fingers off.  Oh, did I mention that this movie is PG-13?  Because clearly violence like this is nothing compared to a movie like Argo, which was mainly rated-R for dropping a couple "f-bombs" in its dialogue.

Alex and his partner, comic relief Tommy Kane (Edward Burns), arrive at the murder scene to investigate.  Alex finds the charcoal drawing left behind by the killer, and figures out who his next target is, because he folds the drawing into two parts joining together, and it creates a person's name.  It's kind of like those fold in covers they would have on the back of issues of Mad Magazine, where it would look like one image, and then you folded the page together, and it would form a different image.  In this case, it turns out that Picasso's next target is a powerful and arrogant CFO of a major corporation.  When Alex and his team intercepts the killer before he can get to his next target, the madman swears revenge, and starts going after Alex's own family.  This sets about a ludicrous revenge fantasy story, where Alex Cross pretty much goes into vigilante mode to hunt down the killer.  And when the two finally confront each other in the climax, we get one of the clumsiest fight scenes in recent memory, thanks to the fact that the camera suddenly develops a spasm for the course of the entire fight, and refuses to stay still.

This is a very lazy, and poorly written movie.  The main characters are hardly touched on, and there are a number of characters who are introduced, and then disappear completely for the rest of the film, such as the young juvenile prisoner that Alex is seen playing chess with at a local prison early on.  There's just a very rushed tone to this, which would probably explain how Alex is able to deduce every detail of a crime just by walking through the door.  The screenplay can't be bothered to explain how Alex knows this stuff, or what led him to the conclusions he reaches.  Not even the rivalry that builds between Cross and the killer is all that engaging.  The villain is supposed to become obsessed with causing pain to Alex by harming his loved ones, but it all seems perfunctory.  To play the role of the killer, Matthew Fox went through a physical transformation, losing a tremendous amount of weight and shaving his head.  It's an impressive transformation, but the script doesn't give him an interesting role to play.

 

Alex Cross was directed by Rob Cohen, who previously has done some big budget action films like Fast and the Furious.  You would think that this movie would include a lot of thrilling chases and action, but the movie is curiously flat all the way through, with dull dialogue and characters that just don't hold our attention.  He might have been the wrong person to tell this particular story, or maybe they should have fitted the story to his more action-heavy specialties.  All I know is given his experience with action, there is no excuse for the horrible fight scene that closes out this movie.

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