Alex Cross (2012)

            Wow, this is a bad movie. I mean, wow. It has a 30 on Metacritic, 12% on Rotten Tomatoes, the director of XXX, and Tyler Perry in the lead—I knew all that going in—and my expectations still weren’t sufficiently lowered.

            If you’re a reader of popular fiction and you spend a lot of time in airports, you’ve probably heard of James Patterson’s most famous creation, Alex Cross, star of one of the bestselling book series in the world. If you are familiar, it probably won’t come as a surprise when I say that the books are—and I actually feel like I’m being extremely charitable here—not very good. They feature two-page chapters, giant print, sloppy, robotic prose, and nonsensical plotting pulled straight out of a troubled thirteen-year-old’s journal of slash fiction. Graphic descriptions of brutal violence and rape are prioritized over all else, and Alex’s romantic partners and family members are constantly being threatened or kidnapped or raped or murdered or fed through a wood chipper.

            “But Charlie,” you’re probably saying, “you seem really familiar with these books that you’re implying you wouldn’t wipe your ass with. Is there something you want to get off your chest?”

            Well observed, dear reader. I have, in fact, read the first ten Alex Cross books (that's ten of twenty-one and counting). Back in my teens, I would even have called myself a fan. I stuck with the series as the page counts went lower and lower, the print got bigger and bigger, and the plots got more and more slapdash, until The Big, Bad Wolf—a book I finished reading, cover to cover, in less than two hours, with a final twist so incoherent that I had to go back and read it over to realize that it only worked as a twist through the power of bad writing. I had what you might call a moment of clarity. “Charlie,” I said to myself—I call myself Charlie—anyway, “Charlie,” I said, “this book makes the novelization of Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith look like The Grapes of Wrath. Reading James Patterson no longer qualifies as a guilty pleasure. You are now actively making yourself dumber.”

            It’s interesting what Patterson’s continued success says about us psychologically—about advertising and herd mentality and brand loyalty. If you go and look at the last five Alex Cross books on Amazon, the reviews are decidedly mixed. I mean, not the official reviews, those are just bad—but the user reviews, even the positive ones, include a lot of, “Not as good as…” and, “I liked Patterson better before he started doling everything out to ghost writers.”

            My favorites, and the most illustrative of what I’m saying, are the kind of reviews that say, “First good Alex Cross since Cat and Mouse,” because Cat and Mouse is the fourth book in the series, which means that the person read anywhere between ten and fifteen books that they didn’t like. Why do we do that? Habit? Brand loyalty? Chasing the high from those first few?

            I don’t have an answer, I just find it interesting. What you should really take away from the last couple-hundred words is that I read the novelization of one of the Star Wars prequels, and I was willing to admit it to you in order to make a point about how bad James Patterson’s books are. Some would say that makes me a hero, but all I’m really interested in is keeping you from making the same mistakes I did.

            There have, of course, been adaptations that surpassed the original works. The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings are a lot more fun to play than The Last Wish or Blood of Elves are to read, though that may be down to the translations. The film 21 Jump Street is so good that I think the association with a crappity ‘80s TV show probably did it more harm than good, all things considered. And as works of pure imagination, the books that make up The Lord of the Rings are wildly impressive, but as stories, they’re a slog—a compelling wordsmith Tolkien was decidedly not—so although I’ve never not fallen asleep during The Two Towers, I’d say The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King are superior to their literary antecedents, at least as far as their potential to be enjoyed.

            But Alex Cross isn’t any of those. It’s violent, it’s tone deaf, and most of all, it’s very, very dumb—in fact, I’d say it’s exactly the adaptation the books deserve.

This is about as subtle as Tyler Perry gets.

             Alex Cross (played, as mentioned, by Tyler Perry) is a detective with the Detroit Police Department, head of a homicide squad so elite that there are only three of them: him, his lifelong friend, Tommy (Edward Burns), and their much younger colleague, Monica. Alex has a degree in psychology—a doctorate, if the German national who keeps calling him “Detective Doctor Cross” is to be believed—and a Holmes-ian knack for observation and deduction.

This is, without question, the very best thing that happens in the movie.

            They’re called in by the CHIEF OF POLICE (John C. McGinley) to investigate the death of a businessman’s secret mistress, who was tortured to death by the sadistic, weird, anorexic, cage fighting, charcoal drawing, special forcing antagonist, nicknamed Picasso (Matthew Fox). It quickly turns into a race to stop him from killing Jean Reno’s fat older brother (Jean Reno), the French billionaire who’s going to pull Detroit up out of Third World status.

I honestly didn't realize it was him until the credits were rolling.

            As that all plays out, Picasso kills both Monica and Detective Doctor Cross’s wife, Maria, Alex and Tommy break into the police evidence lockup in ninja costumes borrowed from the Village People, the CHIEF tells Alex and Tommy they’re OFF THE CASE, and Alex and Picasso have a climactic fistfight in some crumbling Detroit landmark, after Alex is able to locate him with a little help from OnStar. Also: Maria is eight weeks pregnant, Alex is planning on taking a desk job with the FBI, Picasso keeps calling him up to chat for some reason, and Jean Reno’s fat older brother is secretly behind his own murder plot, because he’s planning to fake his own death. Oh, and Cicely Tyson.

            What I’ve described isn’t going to win any awards, but it sounds like it could be a passable thriller, right? Mostly the writing is where it falls apart and bursts into flames. It’s chock full of clichés, it’s got way too much going on, it’s all over the place tonally, and the dialogue is some of the worst I’ve heard in a major release. I kept thinking, as I was watching Alex Cross, that maybe a lot of it was improvised. Because the alternative is that someone typed phrases like, “Let’s talk, gangsta—in a real gangsta car!” after which they looked those words over, maybe read them aloud, and then said to themselves, “Yup, that’s some fantastic dialogue!”

            There’s a scene where Alex and Tommy break into a chemist’s apartment and immediately start whooping his ass, because they’ve been told he knows where to find Picasso. Alex pistol whips his face a few times and Tommy throws him over a table covered in glass drug paraphernalia. When he hits the floor he yells, “I want to see my attorney!” and Alex shouts, without missing a beat, “I am your attorney!”

"Good one, Alex."

            When they’re looking over the first body, we’re subjected to a flashback of Picasso cutting off her fingers and putting them in a bowl. Immediately after the flashback, Alex says, “The first one was to get her to talk—the rest… were for fun.” Immediately after that, Tyler Perry and Edward Burns engage in some light comedy, pushing the bowl of severed fingers back and forth between them and arguing over who’s going to pick one out to use on the thumbprint lock.

            When Alex is first interviewing Big Fatty Reno, Reno says to him, with a knowing tilt to his smile, “Do you like nature, Dr. Cross?”

            And Alex smiles faintly like they’re sharing a hidden understanding and says, “Human nature.”

            Smash cut to: the two of them walking in the woods. Really?

"I mean, seriously?"

            In a scene near the end where Alex is on the phone with Big Fatty Reno, revealing that not only was he hip to the death-faking plan the whole time, but that he and Tommy planted what appears to be forty kilos of cocaine under Big Fatty’s couch cushions, he closes with, “My wife is dead because of you… and now you are dead… because of me.”

            You’re telling me someone wrote all that? Come on.

            Of course, no movie can be a hundred percent bad.

He just heard that Dominic Monaghan accused him of spousal abuse.

            Edward Burns is as likable as always—John McGinley, too, although he often gives the impression that he’s decided to play the CHIEF satirically. I realized somewhere in the first three minutes that I’d never actually seen Tyler Perry in anything—I mean, excluding his cameo in Star Trek. He’s actually much better than I thought he’d be. He has, for lack of a better way to put it, a warm, kind energy about him, and it works for him in the domestic scenes. On the flip side, I’ve never seen Matthew Fox play anything but Jack Shephard and Jack-type characters, and this was, if nothing else, playing against type as hard as he could. I wouldn’t say that either performance is great or anything, but they’re both very watchable.

            There is also a scene where Tyler Perry kicks Matthew Fox in the balls in slow motion.

            And that’s it for the positives!

            Alex Cross is a terrible movie, and most of the time it doesn’t even have the decency to be bad in an entertaining way. No one should ever see it. Not Tyler Perry fans, not James Patterson fans, maybe the cast and crews friends and family, just to be supportive, but NO ONE ELSE.

This is literally the last shot of the movie before the credits, and you find yourself thinking, "Yeah. Yeah, that's about right."