Tyler Perry takes off his director’s cap and his housedress to play the alpha-male lead in this cop thriller, which also reveals that Matthew Fox has totally missed his calling. Who knew the sensitive guy from “Lost” was so in touch with his inner psycho? (Perhaps the female bus driver he allegedly crotch-punched in real life last year knows.)
Aside from these curious role reversals, though, “Alex Cross” is a mess. Drawing on every conceivable ’80s B-movie action cliché and treating its beleaguered female characters like pieces of meat (literally, in one scene of butchery), director Rob Cohen (“The Fast and the Furious”) squanders a surprisingly recognizable cast on a half-baked plot adapted from James Patterson’s series of novels.
Alex Cross (Perry), we quickly learn, is a superhuman police detective who always gets his man, fights for the underdog, loves his family and “can tell you had scrambled eggs for breakfast at 100 yards!” raves his partner Tommy (Ed Burns). This latter-day Sherlock Holmes also uses his freakish powers of deduction to inform his wife (Carmen Ejogo) that “you had a latte,” as he points to a cartoonish dollop of foam resting on her lapel. No wonder the Detroit P.D. is paying him the big bucks.
Alex and Tommy are tracking a killer (Fox) they call Picasso, after his practice of leaving surrealist charcoal drawings at the scene of his latest brutality. The bare-headed, tattooed Fox seems to have simultaneously slimmed down and bulked up for the role, and stayed awake for about two weeks straight. This patented Christian Bale shtick works pretty well for him. It’s too bad he spends most of the film having petulant cellphone conversations with Perry, who’ll eventually go rogue after the killer targets his loved ones, and start threatening to “meet [him] at the gates of hell.”
Perry’s not a terrible actor, but he lacks the brimstone-summoning gravitas of Morgan Freeman, who played Cross in previous Patterson adaptations “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider.” He’s really at his best when bantering with his co-workers, Burns, Rachel Nichols — totally, confoundingly forgotten in the movie’s third act — and police chief John C. McGinley (“Scrubs”), whose presence constantly made me feel the film was about to acknowledge its own silliness. (It doesn’t.)
Also look for enjoyably typecast appearances by Cicely Tyson as Cross’ no-BS mother, Jean Reno as a rich French dude, Giancarlo Esposito as a drug lord and German actor Werner Daehn (you’ll recognize him as Evil Foreign Guy from other movies), who gets to utter my favorite of many howlers: “Nonsense!” he sputters when told he’s in danger. “Zees building ees impenetrable!” As is the logic of the MPAA: This violent, torture-happy film is rated a mere PG-13. If you’re squeamish, consider yourself warned.