Featuring: Tyler Perry, Edward Burns, Matthew Fox
Directed by: Rob Cohen
Running time: 102 minutes
Parental guidance: Violence, sexually suggestive scenesEveryone is allowed to reinvent herself. Even Tyler Perry.
Two and a half stars out of five
Ditching the oversized drag for a great big gun, the man who made Madea a household name, merely through repetition, explores his manly side in this new Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) movie based on a novel by James Patterson.
Taking the screen as titular character Alex Cross, a classic detective comics hero who can tell what you ate for breakfast just by looking at your socks, Perry recreates himself in the twin spirits of James Bond and Shaft ? with a little Sherlock Holmes in there for good measure.
Cross is a family man who works for the Detroit Police Department and he?s one of the best. He and his buddy Tommy Kane (Edward Burns) have taken down some of the city?s worst criminals, so when the chief finds himself with a sticky murder on his hands, he calls in his top guns.
We?ve seen what happened at the now-blood-stained luxury condo. We watched how a beautiful Asian woman and her girlfriends flirted with an unknown mixed martial arts fighter who bought his way into a cage match.
The contender doesn?t talk much, but he really wants to get on the bill. When he warns his opponent not to hit him in the face, the crowd laughs because he?s half the size of the other man in the ring.
Yet, the scrawny fella with the tattoos has that crazy look in his eye. We know he?s a feral animal. He thrashes his opponent and ruins his career with one twist of the arm. Then, he seduces the rich spectator, leads her on with sexual promises and promptly tortures her to death.
The next sequence shows Cross and Tommy snapping on their latex gloves to poke around the crime scene, joking about who has to pick up the amputated thumb to activate the fingerprint scanner.
The whole thing feels so cold and professional, but the killer soon brings an intimacy to the proceedings when he targets Tommy and Cross.
We?re not quite sure why the killer decides to do this, other than he?s a madman with an ability to draw with charcoal in the style of Picasso, but it certainly ramps up the drama in a hurry ? and shakes off a certain amount of predictability by sacrificing central characters at the top of the reel.
Before long, Cross has gone rogue and he?s on a vigilante mission to avenge his family.
The chalk mark outline looks like any other detective thriller, and Alex Cross looks a lot like any other superhero, but this movie feels different and it?s in large part the result of the alchemy between Cohen?s slickness and Tyler?s folksy quality.
Even with a suit and tie, Perry escapes the generic screen presence of most cop characters. A hulking man with a baby face, Perry can pull off the alpha male physicality required for the part. He can also make us believe he?s been raised by Nana Mama (Cicely Tyson), a no-nonsense matriarch who flaps her tea towel to make a point but never loses the sparkle of love in her eye.
Aw.
If it weren?t for the grotesque violence, ambient misogyny, references to sexual torture and the complete absence of any believable motive, this could have been a pretty decent round of action cinema because the bad guy is truly creepy.
Thanks to Matthew Fox (Lost), ?Picasso? emerges as a formidable force of evil because he loves pain, and he enjoys watching others suffer.
When he?s on screen plotting nasty things or hastily killing some curious onlooker for asking the wrong question, the movie has a good anchor bolt because we?re not sure what he?s going to do next.
Alex isn?t as lucky, because good guys have to work within the rules ? even when they go rogue ? and they are bound to a moral framework.
Against the backdrop of a crumbling Detroit, however, internal steel is allowed to rust because society feels that much closer to the abyss, and life seems that much more meaningless.
This movie captures that emptiness, but almost by accident, because when it kills off important people, it?s barely noted. One female cop is sacrificed, and we barely get another mention of the tragedy, even though she had a rich backstory. It?s as though she didn?t really matter to anyone.
Violence loses all of its cinematic power if we do not care about the victims. It?s just gore porn. Cohen certainly tends in this direction, but Perry does not. After wearing floral prints and offering lectures in Mama Madea?s morality to a generation of Americans, Perry embodies a latent conscience that he carries into Alex Cross ? albeit in a holster.
The resulting clash of mood and feeling brings an edge to this otherwise formulaic exercise, but it also scrambles its brains. The movie never answers the questions it raises and leaves core emotional issues unresolved, or completely unaddressed.
As a test of Perry?s masculine star power, Alex Cross does what it has to do ? from showing the actor in tank tops to lovemaking with the ladies. Yet, the scenes he shares with ?Nana Mama? have the most credibility ? even with bad dialogue ? because they play to Perry?s real potency, which unlike most male actors has nothing to do with guns or muscles, but a moral spine.
Without this inherent goodness, Alex Cross would have been entirely unwatchable because it?s simply too dark, and too cavalier with horror. As it is, it?s a bit like Madea playing Rambo: Weird, but compelling enough for the duration.
Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/10/19/alex-cross/
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