Alex Cross: more action, less interest

By Roger Moore

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

“Alex Cross” is an interesting exercise in back-engineering, a prequel that takes us back to the days before the psychologist/police profiler was the sage, solemn and inscrutable sleuth Morgan Freeman ably brought to the screen in two films over a decade ago.

This Cross is cocky, a bit trigger-happy, prone to revenge, a real “action hero.” And this Cross is played by Tyler Perry.

But by definition, he’s less interesting. When you fill in somebody’s back story, you strip away their “loner” mystique. When you focus on the flippant in a film about a frantic hunt for a psychopathicassassin, you diminish the urgency of the hunt and remove the gravitas of the character.

And when you make Tyler Perry run and point a gun, you remember why nobody’s ever used him as an action figure before.

We meet Cross as a domesticated and revered Detroit “detective-doctor,” a hyper-observant wizard his colleagues call “Gandalf,” a man to whom his boss can point at a crime and say, “Solve it, please.”

That’s what happens when an unnamed killer tortures and murders a rich woman with a penchant for mixed martial-arts fighters. Matthew Fox is a coiled spring of tension in this part — lean, all muscles and tattoos and shaved head. He’s also something of a psychotic cliche — twitchy, with blurry flashbacks that make him snap just as he’s about to remove somebody’s fingers or shoot out their eyes.

The script is freely adapted from James Patterson’s “origin story” novel and is packed with indulgent dumbing down.

Director Rob Cohen (“xXx”) pays more attention to the shootouts and fights than the flow of the film, never fretting that there isn’t a moment’s suspense, never letting us feel for the victims.

“Alex Cross” is not an awful movie, but it isn’t a very compelling one.