Alex Cross

I'm going to start out this review with a few disclaimers.  First of all, I am not a big fan of James Patterson's work as an author, or as the inspiration for movies.  I have also not paid any attention to Tyler Perry's body of work; the only Tyler Perry movie I've seen up to this point is Star Trek.  I don't particularly care one way or the other about the choice to reboot this franchise with a younger star (Morgan Freeman played Alex Cross in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider).  Having said all that, I have to point out that the movie trailer for Alex Cross looked pretty generic, at best:

Does anyone actually need to be persuaded to leave Detroit?  And while I am not a big fan of the previous Alex Cross movies, I have to say that I preferred the character as someone who out-thinks the bad guys, instead of just another cop on the edge.  Still, maybe that was just the trailer; it seems unlikely that the movie will have a dubstep score, so maybe the movie was just cut to shreds by the people making the movie trailer.

Alex Cross is, not surprisingly, about Alex Cross (Tyler Perry), a Detroit police detective who for some reason is called "doctor" Cross by most people.  I get it, he probably has a psychology degree or something, but that seems like a title that would not trump "detective," at least not when he is a detective.  Cross and his team --- Alex's lifelong friend, Thomas (Edward Burns), and Thomas's girlfriend, Monica (Rachel Nichols) ---are assigned to a violent crime by their Captain (John C. McGinley) because...um...they're the best?  They're next up on the rotation?  I'm not entirely sure.  The crime scene is in a swanky area, and there are four victims; three are bodyguards who appear to have not gotten a shot off, and the fourth is their client, who was tortured to death while wearing lingerie.  Alex gives the scene the once-over and decides, without any evidence that he's willing to share with the audience or his fellow detectives, that this was all the work of one man.  A highly trained and sadistic man, but one man nonetheless.

"Look, I'm just reading a script.  If you want insight, hire a poet"

At the scene, they recover a Cubist-inspired pencil drawing of the dead woman, writhing in pain.  Or maybe she just looks like a normal Cubist portrait.  I'm not an art critic.  Alex notices something odd in the drawing, though, and --- I have to emphasize how odd a choice this is for any sane person --- treats it like a Mad Magaize fold-in, which results in Alex finding a hidden message in the drawing that identifies the killer's next target.  Remarkably, Alex and his team show up at exactly the same time that the killer (Matthew Fox) does, and they prevent him from eliminating his target.

He shouldn't have wasted time rocking out to "Come Sail Away"

Cross realizes that the real target of this crazy killer must be international businessman Leon Mercier (Jean Reno), who employed both targets.  Why the killer needed to kill off two underlings before his primary target doesn't make much sense (wouldn't it just put Mercier on alert?), but we're in Movie Killer Country now, so you have to roll with it.  Little does Alex Cross realize how much he has inconvenienced the killer, and how personal this case is about to become...

So how does Tyler Perry do in his first true attempt at broadening his acting horizons?  Honestly, I was expecting more.  He did a decent Morgan Freeman impression when profiling the killer, but he was pretty unconvincing when he had to show grief or rage.  There's a part where somebody died, and it was because Alex Cross misjudged the situation; the way Perry moans "I was wrong" almost made it seem like he felt worse about being incorrect than the death.  It's not a wretched performance, though --- just extremely bland.  I really liked Matthew Fox's work as the killer, though.  Fox's physical transformation for the role was impressive and I thought he had some great crazy eyes. 

Unfortunately, his character was poorly developed, so Fox was relegated to being kinda creepy instead of definitely disturbing.  Edward Burns was mediocre as Cross' buddy and partner.  His emotional range was pretty limited, but his character seemed to exist only for Alex Cross to prove him wrong, so I have a hard time imagining Burns turning in a magical performance.  I will say that the chemistry between Burns and Perry was not very impressive for a pair that was supposedly best friends since kindergarten.  Rachel Nichols had a role that mainly consisted of her looking attractive, and she delivered; I wouldn't mind seeing her in a role that actually required acting, but she's perfectly adequate here as a pretty cop.   John C. McGinley was a smart casting choice for a stereotypically caustic police chief --- as much as I hate Zach Braff, I have to admit McGinley was funny on Scrubs --- but the execution was butchered.  McGinley's character winds up being not a foul-mouthed, Lethal Weapon-esque boss, but a temperate, ladder-climbing politician.  What a misuse of resources.  Cicely Tyson was fine as Cross' sassy mother in a bit part, as was Carmen Ejogo as Cross' perfect wife.  I was a little disappointed that Jean Reno didn't have more to work with, but he's reaching a point in his career where he simply gets by playing generic Europeans in Hollywood movies.

Correction: slightly bloated Europeans

I'm not sure that Rob Cohen was the right choice to direct Alex Cross.  I'm not going to lie and say that I haven't enjoyed his work in the past --- xXx and The Fast and the Furious are both great movies to drink to --- but he's not the director I would choose for any movie that wanted to have better dialogue than "I live for this shit."  Here's the thing: you don't hire Rob Cohen to direct a movie unless you want it to be filled with dumb action.  Alex Cross has some action, sure, but it's definitely not a dumb action movie.  Even the action it has --- particularly the hand-to-hand scene with Perry and Fox --- is subpar.  It's one thing to have a camera shaking because there is allegedly so much action, but it's another thing entirely to see a lame fight scene and shake the camera to add some spice.  Cohen is incapable of line coaching or editing things together into a cohesive whole, so I can't justify his involvement in this project.  Alex Cross doesn't fit Cohen's strengths, and it emphasized his weaknesses.

Two out of three people are sitting in this action scene

Speaking of weaknesses, I have to address some of the things that irritated me about Alex Cross.  The film opens with Cross chasing a suspect in an abandoned area in Detroit (so...anywhere in Detroit).  The suspect fires at Cross, and the camera cuts to Cross, who dodges the bullet a few seconds later.  Not a good sign when the opening scene can't manage to get the basics of a firefight correct.  Anyway, Cross and his team chase down the perp.  They all congratulate each other on a good day's work, and the next scene has Cross visiting a woman at a prison, trying to convince her to not do jail time for a crime she did not commit. 

"Good work team.  Let's do very different things and zero paperwork in the next few scenes"

The next scene skips ahead almost twenty-four hours and shows Cross being a vaguely affectionate husband, child and parent.  Are there connections between these scenes?  Only Alex Cross as a character.  The initial criminal has nothing to do with the rest of the movie; the woman in prison is referenced as a means to an end toward the end of the film, and Cross' family time does little to develop him as a character.

Another odd choice had the camera follow Matthew Fox around as he planned and executed his crimes.  First of all, it appears that Fox's character (who is dismissively called "Picasso" once in the movie, and yet IMDb lists it has his character's name) is motivated by money.  To that end, it appears that he will kill to fulfill his contract.  Makes sense, right?  His first target is a sexy lady who likes MMA fights.  Naturally, he enters the octagon, acts brutal and attracts her attention.  Just as naturally, she sees a brutal stranger and invites him to her home for sexy time.  

Yes.  Invite this home.  That makes sense.

After he "tortures her to death" (because that's a scientific cause of death, Mr. Police Coroner), Picasso opts to not take anything of value from her home.  In fact, it seems like this character has his own motivations and that the money he received in his first scene was just icing on top.  Too bad nothing about his motivations are ever revealed.  If he was in it for money, why not steal from his victims?  If he was on a mission, why would he get sidetracked with Alex Cross's team?  I don't need to know his life story, but this character could have been great with maybe five more minutes of cohesive development.

The biggest problem with Alex Cross, though, is with how it handles the main character.  If Alex Cross is such a brilliant detective, shouldn't he be right some of the time?  Or maybe he should prevent crimes?  By the time this movie ends, there are about two dozen dead at the hands of this killer because Cross is consistently wrong.  If Alex Cross hadn't been so "clever," the total would have been closer to three.

Alex Cross always gets his man.  Suck it, math!

It wouldn't have been so annoying if Picasso was supposed to be some kind of genius, but he wasn't.  Except when the script implied that he was, for convenience's sake.  Instead, the resident genius in this movie is Alex Cross, whose insights come from a first-year psychology textbook.  The conclusions he draws from crime scenes do not appear to be based on any evidence, either.  How hard is it to make someone seem smart while interpreting evidence?  That's 95% of American scripted television!  He basically fails where David Caruso succeeds.  Ouch.

I'm a sucker for a good police procedural, but even I couldn't stand Alex Cross.  This was a gross misfire of a well-known and successful property.  It wasn't a bad choice to change the tone of this series --- who doesn't like a little action with their cerebral crime solving? --- but it failed as a fun action movie and as a procedural.  It would be easy to blame Tyler Perry for dropping the ball that Morgan Freeman carried so effortlessly, but the real problem came from the script and direction.  This is less "Don't ever cross Alex Cross" and more "Don't ever watch Alex Cross."

Surviving the Game

Some actors bring a quality assurance to whatever film projects they choose to pursue.  They are the actors you know, the ones that entertain you and turn in good performances in good movies, time after time.  Ice-T does not have that credibility.  This rapper/actor's movie career highlights include Breakin', Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, Johnny Mnemonic, and Leprechaun in the Hood.  To say that Surviving the Game has a good chance of being craptacular is understating the obvious.

To be fair, though, this movie actually has a chance.  It is loosely based on a famous short story, "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell.  The supporting cast is fairly respectable at first glance; there is an Oscar winner for Best Actor, an Oscar nominee, a Golden Globe winner, and an Emmy winner, in addition to a dependable character actor.  Sure, you have a rapper-turned-actor in the lead role, but it's an action movie, so you know his lines will sound something like "Ice to see you...bee-yatch."  The acting load was always going to be on the supporting cast, and the casting sounded promising on paper.

So, where does it all go wrong?  Well, the first indication that this will not be a great movie is that the screenwriting credits do not even acknowledge Connell's story.  That means that they changed enough of the story that they could not be sued by Connell's estate.  So, they took a famous, recognizable idea, and essentially made this the Go-Bots to Connell's Transformers. Try to picture the face of a child hoping for a six foot-tall, fully articulated metal Optimus Prime figure on Christmas morning instead opening up a four dollar plastic Go-Bot.  Hilarious, right?  Well, that wasn't quite my reaction to the de-Connelling of this film, but it was darn close.

Despite the award-caliber supporting cast, the casting was another obstacle for this movie.  When the  highest-profile actor in your action movie is F. Murray Abraham, you have a problem.  Sure, he's a good actor (with astonishingly few good movies under his belt), but he's the wrong choice for a dumb action movie.  Oh, and Gary Busey plays a psychiatrist.  Busey telling people that they're crazy is the ballsiest casting I can remember that didn't include the words "Denise Richards" and "nuclear scientist."  Rutger Hauer isn't a bad choice; he's played crazy before, but here he's a lot older and fatter, with a pretty dubious ponytail.  Rounding out the supporting cast, there is Charles S. Dutton, whose voice is always nice to hear in a movie, although his movies are usually pretty bad.  There is also a pre-Scrubs John C. McGinley, which means that he plays a sniffling wuss.  Now that you know who the award-winning cast is, it seems a whole lot less impressive, doesn't it?

With that in mind, let's review the plot.  The movie opens with a montage of life on the street with Mason (Ice-T), interrupted by periodic clips of a raggedy-looking guy being hunted in the wild and dying by crossbow.  We spend a little bit of time with Mason, learning precious little except that he is alone and homeless, with his only friend and his dog both dying in the film's first five minutes.  We also see Mason get into a scuffle with a security guard, where he doesn't actually beat up the guard, but acts pretty crazy; there is a shadowy figure watching the scene from a conveniently parked car, who is never referred to again.  Mason is prevented from committing suicide by a homeless shelter volunteer (Charles S. Dutton), who gives Mason a business card for a job opportunity.  The job is to be a wilderness guide for a group of rich men on a hunting trip.  Leading them are Burns (Rutger Hauer) and Cole (Dutton), but they will be joined by Doc Hawkins (Busey), a wealthy oilman (McGinley), a businessman (Abraham) and his son.  Once they have all traveled and met in the remote Canadian woods at their cabin, the group has a meal together and, in the morning, wakes up Mason at gunpoint.  They inform Mason of their intent to hunt and kill him for sport, and they give him a small head start.  The game begins.

For reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, it takes over forty minutes to get to the start of the hunt.  It's not like the filmmakers wasted any script on character development, they just took their sweet time getting to the only part of the movie anybody cares about.  This isn't a movie that is pandering to critics, so there is no excuse for this waste of my (admittedly worthless) time.  What were they expecting?  The audience to say, "Aww...Ice-T named his dog Mango, and now Mango is dead!  Why do the good die young?!?"  No, the audience was undoubtedly thinking "Mango?  That's the best dog name you could come up with?"  The forty minutes wasn't even spent building up a mystery, either.  If the plot made you wonder why outdoorsmen would hire a homeless guy to lead them into the wilderness, that's one thing.  But you know that homeless people will be hunted in the woods because it's shown in the opening scenes.  Not only is there no suspense, there is not even the pretense of suspense.  There is, however, the question of what the hell Mason was thinking when he took the job.  Far be it from me to be cynical, but a street rat (to borrow a Disney term) being hired to lead veteran hunters in the wild is enough to make my alarm bells go off.  Add in way too much money ($500 a week plus room and board in 1994) for the work being done, and you have a definite sucker punch coming.  Of course, that's just me.  Perhaps Ice-T is one of those guys that sends his social security number and bank account info to that African prince who keeps emailing me about a profitable deal that requires no work from me.  What could possibly go wrong?

The rest of the movie is much better than the first half.  Mason is hunted for a bit, but the hunters are very clever; they only always travel by loud ATVs and shout Mason's name when they're chasing him.  You see, that will throw Mason off, because he is going to expect them to be sneaky.  Surprisingly, Mason doesn't do most of the killing in this movie.  Two die by accident, another by Dutton, and one by Hauer.  Mason manages to kill one person with his hands.  The other dies when Mason throws him into the hunting group's cabin (now on fire), specifically in the trophy room, with a couple dozen severed human heads in mason jars.  Get it?  Ice-T's name is Mason!  What a great script.  Anyway, pickled heads are apparently very explosive, so as soon as Mason thrown the guy into the room, the whole place blows.

I'll skip most of the action scenes and just cut to the end.  Not surprisingly, the two headlining actors survive the game hunting trip.  When it comes down to just Ice-T and Hauer, Ice-T races off on an ATV (after sustaining a badly injured knee and a bullet in his gut) toward the plane that will take the hunting group home.  Only, when T arrives, he realizes that something is wrong.  The airplane explodes.  Brilliantly, Hauer anticipated the need for a fully functional airplane, stocked with explosives that could be set off remotely.  Hauer then goes to the real airplane and flies back to the city.  Ice-T, though, survived the game plane explosion and is apparently able to get back to the United States with a bullet-perforated stomach (never mind what the explosion did to him) within three days.  I assume he made it by ATV, because he would have been hospitalized by anyone who gave him a ride anywhere. Nothing promises fun like a severe abdominal wound and off-roading in an ATV for a few hundred miles.  Three days later, Hauer is preparing to skip town under an assumed identity.  He apparently has dozens of soldier identities lined up with false passports, but he chooses his foreign priest outfit.  Eschewing the easy way to disguise his identity (shaving his beard off and cutting his hair), Hauer carefully dyes both hair and beard black, ties his hair into a single braid, and dons a small hat with a big yarn puff on the top and a long robe.  If it wasn't for the priest collar and the rosary (seriously, what denomination wears this?), I would have mistaken the outfit for that of a railroad-era Chinese immigrant.  Anyway, Hauer soon finds himself face-to-face with an inexplicably healthy Ice-T, only this time, they're on his turf.  The game is over.

My biggest gripe about this film is that they never --- not even once! --- say anything along the line of "we hunt the most dangerous game of all...MAN."  What a letdown!  Aside from that, this movie is about what you would expect.  The acting is pretty terrible.  Ernest R. Dickerson's direction is horrible.  The pacing is god awful.  The decisions are inexplicable (Hey, Ice-T, you just got a job...want to clean up your look?  Well, I guess cutting your dreads to only shoulder length and shaving your beard into a fu manchu is pretty office-friendly).  The hair choices are astounding --- Ice-T's fake dreads stick out more than even Bob Marley's kids' hair and Rutger Hauer sports an ineffectual ponytail.  It isn't surprising that this movie is filled with moments that make absolutely no sense (a cabbie picks a fistfight with a homeless guy?  A night security guard is willing to murder a different homeless guy for no reason?), but it is surprising that these moments are the most entertaining in the film.

On the plus side, the action isn't bad and the movie avoids racist undertones by casting Charles S. Dutton as one of the hunters.  Instead, the movie is just classist, which isn't offensive at all.

As a film, this movie fails in almost every way.  It's not unwatchable, but it's the sort of thing you would be proud of only if your kid made it.  Unfortunately, this is not nearly dumb enough to entertain me as a funny-bad movie.  Well, parts of it are certainly funny-bad, but there are long stretches where the movie is just boring.  If someone cut the first half hour of the movie, this could be a poorly made finger-quotes classic.  As it is, it's just a bad movie that hunts the most valuable game of all...your time.  Seriously, it pisses me off that they don't use that line in the movie.