In an adaptation of the hit novel series, Alex Cross is after a highly-trained assassin. Sadly, the script is a bigger crime to solve..
Alex Cross is a Detroit homicide detective with an almost Sherlockian gift for profiling and observing the world around him. He has a loving wife, two children – and another on the way – a police partner that he's known since kindergarten and career prospects on fast-track. In short, life is good… though he's preparing to put the days of physically chasing down criminals behind him for a more cushy desk top in Washington.
However a new investigation is going to change everything. A powerful drug-queen and her staff have been murdered in her high-security villa, a crime that Cross feels was inacted by one man alone. When Cross and his team Tommy Kane (Ed Burns) and Monica Ashe (Rachel Nichols) realise that this could be the first 'hit' amongst many, they race to save a wealthy industrialist and encounter the killer, branded 'Picasso' (Matthew Fox) because he leaves sketches at his crimes. Picasso escapes and though Cross thinks the killer is too specific to deviate from his job and threaten his pursuers, it turns out this is one of the times when Cross is wrong…. a mistake that will cost some close to him very dearly indeed…
The character of Alex Cross was previously seen on screen fifteen years ago in Kiss the Girls and Along Came A Spider, where the older version of the character was played by Morgan Freeman. There were some raised eyebrows when Tyler Perry, best known for his comedies, was cast in the 'origin story' of the police detective (as much as when Tom Cruise was cast as the Vampire L'estat, or for that matter in the upcoming Jack Reacher – another cop film based on a book franchise). However, in a world where the likes of Michael Keaton successfully flew in the face of obvious casting for the 1990s' Batman, it was only fair to wait for the finished result.
Oh dear.
While I've personally found James Patterson's books to be formulaic and somewhat workmanlike, there's no doubt he's a prolific and popular author – but sad to say, Alex Cross – the unimaginatively titled film about his detective of the same name – manages to feel inept and heavy-laden on just about every level.
Sadly, Perry proves to be out of his depth, woefully miscast in a role that requires at least a soupçon of charisma and gravitas – utterly failing to imbue the character with any of the passion needed. To be fair to the actor, he is saddled with a script so bland, leaden and jigsaw'd together from previous genre outings that it feels as if the 1980s straight-to-video market have just called in their marker and want their level of subtlety back. For a film with a major cinema release, the dialogue is trite and atrocious, barely supporting a bizarre plot unfettered with internal logic and with even the most supposedly heartfelt scenes more likely to have you rolling your eyes than reaching for the tissues.
Matthew Fox, most famously nice-guy Jack Shepherd on LOST, seems to have taken a vastly underwritten role merely because he's being allowed to play against type. Unfortunately, he too is given a one-dimensional character – the kind of invincible tattooed-psychopath-assassin that is more tempted to eat the scenery than his victims and which Fox chooses to frame by jerky head movements and wide-eyed comic-book glares. (Though the actor has clearly decided to go the distance and look the part!)
For a supposedly sadistic character and major 'antagonist', he is just unpleasant enough to dislike, but the '15' certificate means we're told about his deadly deeds happening off-camera rather than anything more visceral or revealing or even using subtle camerawork…
Ed Burns, Rachel Nichols and John C McGinley all essay one-note FBI officers that they've done countless times before (and better) elsewhere and Jean Reno pushes his 'makes-any-film-better-by-appearing-in-it' ratio to breaking point as an egotistical CEO whose level of needless expostion wouldn't even be realistic if he had a twirling moustache and lived in the shallowest corner of the Marvel Universe.
Rob Cohen, whose heyday of Daylight, xXx and Dragonheart is now long behind him, doesn't add any positives either with lacklustre direction and cinematography – one long scene shot from the p.o.v. of the back-seat of Picasso's car merely looking as if someone left the camera running by accident.
One probably shouldn't have expected Shakespeare from this outing as all the warning signs of a car-crash project were there ahead of release, but it's something of an achievement to have something come out THIS ham-fisted and disappointingly bland. Likely to sink from cinemas pretty quickly, one suspects it will quickly find sanctuary on DVD, but it might still be worth waiting for a bargain-bin sale price or going for any of the superior procedural films from which it borrows shamelessly.
Alex Cross (15) is released by Entertainment Film Distributors across the UK today.
4/10
