A homicide detective, played by Tyler Perry, is pushed to the brink of his moral and physical limits in Alex Cross. He tangles with a ferociously skilled serial killer who specializes in torture and pain.
Alex Cross is a film that is loosely based on James Patterson’s 12th novel, Cross, featuring the PhD-totting forensic psychologist. It seems to have missed the mark with most critics, however. For me, it has managed to seize quite an astonishing 4.8/10 rating on IMDB as of today – whichever way you look at it.
But indeed, “watching Tyler Perry strain his way through Alex Cross”, says Peter Debruge of Variety, was painful to behold. “The cross-dressing Madea seemed out of his depth playing the hard-boiled detective made famous by Morgan Freeman in Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls.”
Though the thriller sought to recast a new image of Tyler Perry, the film fell short. What “this clunky thriller clearly intended, perhaps, was to mold the cash cow Tyler Perry into a new” fish – capable of swimming across waters – especially on the heels of Good Deeds and his recent Star Trek cameo, both of which may have suggested untapped versatility. But, it turned out rather to expose Tyler Perry as a fish out of water – an actor of very limited ability beyond his immediate boundary.
I cannot particularly comment on Tyler Perry’s handling of the role, but I can conclude in my apparent dismay that Alex Cross is an all-round flat-out movie with action scenes less convincing than the 4th coming of Christ. I didn’t like the movie – a bad script coupled with a sloppy antagonist, altogether culminating in a tacky movie.
A Metrobloc writer describing a “late scene involving a rocket launcher” said it was nicely executed, but he added that the “drawn-out final confrontation in a dilapidated building stretched any remaining credibility to the breaking point.
The image of Perry desperately hanging by a thread, as if threatening to take the whole structure with him, provided an unfortunately apt emblem for this dismal attempt.”
Marc Mohan at the Oregonian breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the movie while unmistakably recounting it as a “stunningly perfunctory, soul-crushingly oblivious” film which “to its own lack of originality” churned out a completely dissatisfying thriller and “to be blunt, just plain dumb.”
I can only conclude after my own ordeal, that Alex Cross is not a good movie. To put it another way, of the three films featuring James Patterson’s most famous character, and of any film that will be made on this subject, this one, perhaps, will remain ranked at the bottom of any list.
Director: Rob Cohen
Writers: Marc Moss (screenplay), Kerry Williamson (screenplay)
Stars: Tyler Perry, Matthew Fox and Rachel Nichols
