Wednesday 18 May 2016

Alex Cross (2012)

Genre

Action | Crime | Thriller

Director

Rob Cohen

Country

USA

Cast

Tyler Perry, Matthew Fox, Edward Burns, Jean Reno, Carmen Ejogo, Cicely Tyson, Rachel Nichols, John C. McGinley, Werner Daehn, Yara Shahidi, Sayeed Shahidi, Bonnie Bentley, Simenona Martinez, Stephanie Jacobsen, Giancarlo Esposito, Ingo Rademacher

Storyline

Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) is on his last police duty to track down an assassin called Picasso (Matthew Fox), who's been torturing and killing rich businessmen in Detroit. Soon when the mission gets personal, Cross is pushed to the edge of his moral and psychological limits to end this once and for all.

Opinion

I haven't read James Patterson's novels nor have I seen the previous films about Alex Cross starring Morgan Freeman, so frankly I don't understand why I added this film on my watchlist in the first place. I still decided to give it a try, but what a mistake.

"Alex Cross" is like some kind of mockery for the thriller genre as it looks more like TV series material than movie material.

The writing is very, very poor. I used to watch CSI, and I liked it, but I kind of have higher standards when I'm watching a film that is supposed to be a thriller. The story is banal, superficial, completely unrealistic, lacks tension and fails to provoke any kind of engagement with the viewer.

I refuse to believe professionals, some guys actually paid to write, managed to write something as cheap as this movies' script. The film tries to explain what is going to happen before things even happen, completely killing the tension. If there was any. Something like this could have been made by a 5-year-old kid, not a writer. Sure, there is a final twist, but when you get there you won't even care anymore about what happens.

The film has huge problems with the cast as well. First of all, Tyler Perry. The guy does comedies and you can tell because the film is funny when it is not supposed to be. And Matthew Fox. I don't even like him - I really can't stand him on "Lost" -, but while he looks like he's having a lot of fun going around torturing people, I was annoyed. Still, like Perry, he managed to make the film laughable.

Not an epic fail though because the acting wasn't hundred percent garbage.

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