ALEX CROSS

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

GRADE: F

Tyler Perry, Matthew Fox, Edward Burns, Rachel Nichols, Jean Reno, Carmen Ejogo, Giancarlo Esposito, Cicely Tyson

Screenplay by Mark Moss and Kerry Williamson 
Based on the novel "Cross" by James Patterson
Directed by Rob Cohen

Someone has to make Michael Bay look like a great filmmaker. And that's why we have Rob Cohen.

In the '90's, Cohen gave us such immortal classics as Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Dragonheart and Daylight, before fading into obscurity. This string of failures led to the belief that Cohen's career was pretty much over. But then, in the early 2000's, Rob surprised everyone with the release of the subtle, quiet, character based The Fast and The Furious, which turned out to be a surprise hit at the box office, proving once and for all that H.L. Mencken's famous quote “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” was, if anything, too kind. Cohen and his new found cohort, Vin Diesel, an actor who would go on to show considerable ability to grow even uglier over the years and sound like he not only smoked twelve packs of cigarettes per day but then apparently ate them, became a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. They immediately re-teamed for XXX, a new take on the spy genre in the sense that it explored the idea that there was no reason an intelligence agent had be able to pass the G.E.D. Somehow, despite approximately two thousand close-ups of the tattoo on Diesel’s neck and a series of clumsily staged action sequences that would fail to get Wyle E. Coyote to suspend disbelief, XXX did not succeed at dethroning James Bond as the top spy franchise.

But Cohen was not about to give up. Soon, he made the critics who doubted him eat their words when he gave us Stealth, a wickedly clever variation on Short Circuit and Blue Thunder that dared to pose questions such as “what if an airplane was like, alive or something?” and “Does Jessica Biel have large breasts?” Unfortunately for Cohen, the critics who had just eaten their words promptly threw them back up again all over his film. But let's be honest: a movie with such lofty artistic goals was of course, destined to be under-appreciated in it's time, much like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Tango & Cash. After that, Cohen was reduced to taking Stephen Sommer'shand-me-downs, and he gavesus The Mummy: The Curse Of the Dragon Emperor, which some praised as the best film of Cohen's career, much in the same way that one would praise tax evasion as one of Al Capone's lesser crimes.

But now, it's a new decade (name undecided at press time), and Rob Cohen has found a way to rise again, by once again teaming with a rising talent with a charisma that cannot be denied, unless you look up the word charisma in the dictionary, at which point there is no defending him. Yes, I'm talking about the white Eddie Murphy, Tyler Perry.

When it was decided that every beloved franchise had already been rebooted at least once already, Hollywood decided to tackle reinventing James Patterson's criminal psychologist hero Alex Cross, who had been so memorable portrayed by Morgan Freeman in That One Movie and The Other One. But of course, being a reboot, this time the character has to be younger, and cooler, and just getting started on his path to glory.

Alex Cross follows it's title character, who in this particular incarnation is a Detriot Police Detective, as he investigates a bizarre series of murders that appear to be the work of an assassin, who is working his way up the corporate ladder one killing at a time until he gets to jillionaire businessman Leon Mercier (Jean Reno.). This is not just a normal assassin, though: this guy takes pleasure in his work, much like a serial killer, and he has apparently watched Ralph Fiennes performance in Red Dragon too many times (once.). This killer is more than a match for our hero, despite the fact that Cross is both a Detective and a Doctor, a fact that is subtly reinforced to the audience every time one of the endless parade of smarmy supporting characters refers to him as “Detective Doctor Cross,” or when he casually drops references to his psychology degree to impress people he's apparently just met, such as his wife, or his partner/childhood best friend Tommy (Edward Burns). So it's a game of cat and mouse, with the killer playing the role of the cat and Cross playing the role of Sherlock Holmes as portrayed by Fat Albert. Every time the genius Detective Doctor expects this killer to zig, he zags, and when Cross has the epiphany to start expecting him to zag, wouldn't you know it, the clever little minx decides to zig.

But when the killer not only shoots down Cross's wife, killing her and the Detective Doctor's unborn child before it even has a chance at life, but also murder's Tommy girlfriend (Rachel Nichols of G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra and Conan the Barbarian) before she even gets chance to show us some cleavage, then it becomes personal. Alex and Tommy are not cops anymore. They're not even Doctors. Well, Alex is, but Tommy isn't. Actually they are both technically still cops and Alex is still a doctor (Detective Doctor, in fact), but the point is, they aren't acting as cops. In fact, anyone watching Perry and Burns' performances could make a powerful argument that they aren't acting at all. This isn't about justice anymore – it's about revenge.

Despite its short run time and eagerness to rush through character development in favor of moving the action along, Alex Cross felt like the most brutally long movie I've sat through all year. The script is clumsy and insipid, and the action is staged with a lack of style that is matched only by its lack of realism (the final showdown between Perry and Fox has to be the least exctiting, and least credible, knock down drag out fight sequence of the year. Despite Fox's tiny, emaciated frame, the character is rather unconvincingly established as a UFC caliber fighter, and yet we are meant to believe that the good Detective Doctor, who displays all of the motor coordination of an epileptic manatee, is able to overpower him through sheer rage. ).

And then there's the acting: Matthew Fox as the assassin, who calls himself “The Butcher,” gives a performance that is equal parts posturing and histrionics. Someone seems to have convinced Fox that this was a really good role and it was worth dropping a significant amount of weight in order to play the character in such a way that he can both physically and characteristically resemble a garden snake. Fox chews through the scenery like it was made of Bubble Yum, and his performance evokes not only the aforementioned turn by Fiennes in Red Dragon, but also Andy Serkiss as Gollum, Robert De Niro in both Taxi Driver and Cape Fear, and, in a particularly bold choice, Donald Duck in the cartoon where he gets magic powers and goes insane and starts shooting lightning bolts from his fingertips. In contrast, Perry and Burns seem so mellow that it almost feels like they don't realize the cameras are rolling and they are just hitting their marks to run through blocking. Cohen seems almost afraid to direct the two, realizing that they are both experienced directors (though apparently forgetting that they are not particularly good directors.). One also has to wonder how it is that these two have lived in Detroit as best friends since Kindergarten, but at some point one developed a Louisiana drawl and the other a Queens dialect.

The twist at the end isn't much of a twist, and even if it was, it wasn't worth the time it takes to get there. By that time, the film has already failed both as a mystery and as an action-crime thriller, and as the ending credits rolls, one can't help but suspect that meetings on how to completely reboot the reboot are already taking place. But I have a feeling that we haven't seen the last of Rob Cohen. Like a cockroach after a nuclear holocaust, he always seems to survive even the most terrible of things.

Alex Cross is rated PG-13 for violence, torture, sex, profanity, partial nudity, drug references and disturbing images (and yet The King's Speech is still an R.)