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63Director Rob Cohen shoots believable action sequences, too. Nobody jumps the gap between skyscrapers or falls 40 feet, then gets up and runs away.
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60Rebooting novelist James Patterson's famous Alex Cross character for the big screen, Tyler Perry aims at new cinematic territory and scores a bullseye as the Detroit detective embroiled in a hunt for a mega-evil killer that turns personal.
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50Alex Cross isn't meant to be analyzed too deeply. The title character probably sums up the best strategy for appreciating the film's modest pleasures when he says, "Don't overthink it; I'm just looking for a bad guy."
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50There is one thing interesting about Alex Cross, and if you miss this, you've missed the whole movie. It's not the story - it's worse than mediocre. It's not the lead actor - nothing wrong with Tyler Perry, but as an action star he's no Vin Diesel. And it's not the dialogue, which has a clunker every other scene. It's the direction. Notice the direction. Alex Cross is a good example of what a seriously talented director can do with a heaping pile of garbage.
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Oct 18, 201250Alex Cross is filled with accidental comedy, and while it's a mess in any traditional movie sense, it's has its moments of preposterous fun that come in the form of a nonsensical plot and a fabulously competent, scenery-gnawing villain.
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50There's nothing in Alex Cross that argues another installment is warranted, but much will depend on whether Tyler Perry's audience crosses over and continues to follow him in this new, very different role.
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50Where Freeman was warm but enigmatic, Perry is warm but empty.
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50The sharpest five minutes in Alex Cross, by a considerable margin, belong to Giancarlo Esposito.
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50A disjointed thriller with two many characters rattling around.
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50Perry must have felt it was high time for him to try his hand at playing a darker role. But starring in this badly directed, suspense-free film with its unintentionally laughable dialogue does Perry no favors.
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Nov 25, 201240Miscast and underwritten, Alex Cross does not reinvent Tyler Perry, or James Patterson's character, or anything, really. The only appeal here is the sick kick of watching a franchise blow itself to bloody stumps.
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Oct 23, 201240Picture Alan Alda in the title role of "Dirty Harry," and you have a good idea why Tyler Perry playing a hard-edged cop in "Alex Cross" doesn't work. [19 Oct 2012]
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40The resulting film, despite its occasional outbursts of action and tension, is less an action film than a psychological thriller, although even there it fumbles the ball.
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40It neglects, for one thing, to make any sense.
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40It's a strange sort of film that casts Gallic tough guy Jean Reno as a clean-fingernailed mogul while employing cross-dressing comic Tyler Perry as a guy capable of hand-to-hand combat with someone called The Butcher of Sligo.
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40Though they lack chemistry as a team, it's gratifying to see both Perry and Burns stretching in ways they haven't before.
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40You almost feel sorry for Tyler Perry, stepping out of his own universe for the first time to try to expand his range and finding himself in something as thoroughly dismal as Alex Cross.
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38Aside 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 squanders a surprisingly recognizable cast on a half-baked plot adapted from James Patterson's series of novels.
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38Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.
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Oct 17, 201233Perry shifts into full-on badass mode... well, the best that can be said is that he's sincere. For all that, he's still less embarrassing than Lost's Matthew Fox, likewise cast against type as the film's sadistic villain.
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Oct 20, 201230There's not a moment in Alex Cross that doesn't function splendidly as comedy. Which means that for all his cool-cat preening and heroic soul-searching, Tyler Perry must have felt right at home.
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30What a whorish film this is: Even the serial killer lectures the detective.
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30It's a courageous but misguided move on Perry's part; he has none of Freeman's soulful, nuanced subtlety, and watching him display the gamut of emotions called for in Marc Moss and Kerry Williamson's script is like watching the Hulk attempt Swan Lake.
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25In the face of such junk, the idea that Fox would proudly put himself on a punishing regime of severe diet and exercise to get prisoner-skinny-yet-crazy-muscled for the job of make-believe is vanity at best, obscenity at worst.
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Oct 18, 201225Instead of playing the role in drag, the erstwhile Madea simply is a drag.
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25Alex Cross is slipshod cinema hoping to capitalize on a star out of his orbit here.
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25Formulaic serial-killer crapola.
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20In drag or out of it, the soft-spoken star has rarely been less convincing than when locking and loading from his home arsenal or dangling from a decaying Detroit edifice.
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20A grim, dispiritingly stupid waste of time, energy, money and talent.
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20The best of the Alex Cross mess suggests that as an actor, he has the talent to move beyond the world of Madea should he want to. He just needs to look for much better material.
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20The cross-dressing "Madea" star seems out of his depth playing the hard-boiled detective made famous by Morgan Freeman in "Along Came a Spider" and "Kiss the Girls." Even action helmer Rob Cohen ("The Fast and the Furious," "XXX") seems to be off his game here.
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16The movie is stunningly perfunctory, soul-crushingly oblivious to its own lack of originality, and, to be blunt, just plain dumb.
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16Alex Cross is more boring than your average weeknight procedural, except much longer, dumber and more violent.
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Oct 17, 201212Expositional and often self-serious to the point of genuine awkwardness, the dialogue is never as haltingly unconvincing as when it's attempting to give some approximation of Alex Cross's essential looseness and good humor.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 23
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Mixed: 6 out of 23
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Negative: 8 out of 23
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9
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Poorly acted, lazily written, and not really directed at all, Alex Cross is the most clichéd action movie of the year.