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Alex Cross (15)
Director: Rob Cohen
Starring: Tyler Perry, Matthew Fox, Rachel Nichols and Jean Reno.
Running time: 1hr 41mins.
WELL this was quite the disappointment: I always appreciated Morgan Freeman’s interpretation of Doctor Alex Cross.
Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider were well-thought out stories with a fair amount of suspense.
However, what we have with this prequel is little more than a bog-standard actioner.
It has the perfunctory villain who likes to inflict pain and constantly eludes the hardworking plods sent to catch him.
Basically, there’s a assassin who has been hired to, apparently, kill a successful businessman and Dr Cross and his team are dispatched to stop him.
There is a liberal sprinkling of killings along the way to keep you hooked.
But, I’m afraid I’ve come to expect more from a film featuring Dr Alex Cross.
The other films had a genuine air of tension while this has a banality and you wonder just when the perpetrator will be caught, rather than if he’ll be caught.
The Alex Cross franchise has done well for the studios, and one feels that if they are venturing into the realms of filming a prequel, they should really should have put in more effort.
Firstly, they should have come up with a more heavyweight actor to play the lead.
Tyler Perry is accomplished actor, but he’s no Morgan Freeman by any stretch.
For a start, he’s three inches taller than Morgan – that’s a lot of height to lose due to aging.
He’s, physically, much more bulky than Freeman.
But these things could maybe be ignored if it were not for the actors’ wildly differing acting styles.
Perry’s acting may work for the type of film Alex Cross, the movie, ended up but it doesn’t fit with the type of established character we have come to know – quietly spoken and methodical.
Perry, however, is more your wisecracking dude who, when he does actually work out how it’s done, it seems to be regarded as an unnecessary pause between action scenes with the explanation tossed in from practically nowhere.
Indeed there seems to be little to explain Cross’s doctorate and I was surprised that he had one at the time of the film’s setting.
The film may bear the name Alex Cross, but it’s at that point only that the film meets and departs from its much more satisfactory predecessors.
You have been warned.
Rating: 2/5
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Tuesday 21 May 2013
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