Playing it straight can be a drag
By David Germain |
October 28, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
JAMES Patterson titled his 12th Alex Cross crime novel simply "Cross." The filmmakers who adapted it expanded the title to "Alex Cross."
They might as well have gone for broke and called it "Tyler Perry's Madea's Stab at Expanding Her-His Hollywood Marketability as James Patterson's Alex Cross."
Perry's name will draw his fans in. Patterson's name will draw his fans in. There's no trace of Madea -- the fearsome elderly woman character created and portrayed by Tyler - in director Rob Cohen's adaptation, yet the spirit of the sassy grandma inevitably hangs over the project for viewers curious to see Perry playing it straight and dramatic.
Alex Cross the man and "Alex Cross" the movie wind up suffering for it. It's perfectly reasonable for Perry to try to broaden his enormous popularity beyond the Madea lineage in his own raucous portraits of family life. It's also reasonable to say that casting Perry as Cross was a bad idea, though it's not necessarily the worst in a movie built on bad ideas.
Perry has little allure as supposedly brilliant criminal profiler Cross. While no one expects a Morgan Freeman, who played Cross in "Kiss the Girls" and "Along Came a Spider," Perry is low-key bordering on sleepwalker dull. The standard-issue cop-vs-serial-killer story presents Cross as a dopey psycho-babbler tracking a killer code-named Picasso (Matthew Fox) who's murdering execs at an international conglomerate.
Cross' profile technique amounts to "I don't have any concrete information about this perp so I'm going to spout vague generalities while furrowing my brow." He blathers on about Picasso as a rogue sociopath, a narcissist out to make someone suffer, maybe his mom or his dad or himself or the whole world.
"Who the hell knows?" Cross says. Tyler Perry's Alex Cross certainly doesn't. Neither does Tyler Perry.
They might as well have gone for broke and called it "Tyler Perry's Madea's Stab at Expanding Her-His Hollywood Marketability as James Patterson's Alex Cross."
Perry's name will draw his fans in. Patterson's name will draw his fans in. There's no trace of Madea -- the fearsome elderly woman character created and portrayed by Tyler - in director Rob Cohen's adaptation, yet the spirit of the sassy grandma inevitably hangs over the project for viewers curious to see Perry playing it straight and dramatic.
Alex Cross the man and "Alex Cross" the movie wind up suffering for it. It's perfectly reasonable for Perry to try to broaden his enormous popularity beyond the Madea lineage in his own raucous portraits of family life. It's also reasonable to say that casting Perry as Cross was a bad idea, though it's not necessarily the worst in a movie built on bad ideas.
Perry has little allure as supposedly brilliant criminal profiler Cross. While no one expects a Morgan Freeman, who played Cross in "Kiss the Girls" and "Along Came a Spider," Perry is low-key bordering on sleepwalker dull. The standard-issue cop-vs-serial-killer story presents Cross as a dopey psycho-babbler tracking a killer code-named Picasso (Matthew Fox) who's murdering execs at an international conglomerate.
Cross' profile technique amounts to "I don't have any concrete information about this perp so I'm going to spout vague generalities while furrowing my brow." He blathers on about Picasso as a rogue sociopath, a narcissist out to make someone suffer, maybe his mom or his dad or himself or the whole world.
"Who the hell knows?" Cross says. Tyler Perry's Alex Cross certainly doesn't. Neither does Tyler Perry.
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