Wrong, Wrong, Wrong By Fearless Young Orphan Alex Cross (2012) Directed by Rob Cohen Alex Cross has a 12% rating at rottentomatoes.com. I haven’t read any Alex Cross books yet, so mercifully I won’t be doing one of my “waah waah this isn’t as good as the book” things like I did with Paranoia. This Hunk of Happiness will be more like, “waah waah this isn’t as good as the last time I cut my toenails.” What a terrible movie this is, and that’s coming from a girl here who likes bad movies. It’s not even fun-bad, it’s more like offensive-bad, like after it was over, my movie buddy and I were grimacing and embarrassed that we’d gotten involved in the whole mess. Alex Cross is a famous literary character created by prolific author James Patterson. Cross is an FBI profiler whose powers of deduction make him an invaluable asset in hunting for serial and mass murderers, a real terror to the criminal minds out there. I guess that this movie is supposed to be his origin story or something like it, about how he decided to go from being a Detroit cop to working for the FBI. I realized I hit a stutter just now while I was trying to figure out what exactly causes Cross to decide to make the move to the FBI. I couldn’t remember exactly what the movie told me. It’s not a complicated movie, but it does have an extremely poorly organized script. So Alex wants to go to DC. At first it’s because his wife is pregnant with their third child and this seems like a better place to continue raising their family. And then later it seems to be motivated by his desire to get away from that particular home because his pregnant wife is brutally killed by an assassin. Possibly it is also because he wants to continue the fight against evil, which he has done an absolutely crap job of so far – it was likely his own stupidity that contributed to his wife’s death, since he completely misjudged the assassin’s modus operandi and then, worse, failed to take any basic safety measures. Okay, let’s back up for a second. Alex Cross is working for the Detroit police and he’s “brilliant” for some reason, I guess because he can tell at 100 yards what a person had for breakfast (this virtue is actually touted in the movie) but I fail to see how breakfast- guessing it going to help him with much. He works for an idiot boss, as all brilliant cops invariably do, and has a team with him that includes young pretty white people, Edward Burns and Rachel Nichols, who are having an affair and blah blah blah. Anyhoo this assassin comes to town and starts, well, assassinating powerful rich people. The assassin is played by Matthew Fox, who has undergone one of those crazy actor- transformations by dropping a bunch of weight and working out with horses and oxen so that now he looks like he was just released from Summer Torture Camp. He’s a really bad guy, but damn folks, is he an excellent assassin, able to find his way into everywhere with an endless supply of snarling badass. When Alex Cross and his team interfere with this guy’s second assassination, he gets pissed off and comes after them, and since Alex has completely misunderstood everything including “basic security measures”, both his wife and Rachel Nichols’ character are killed. Time for vigilante justice! Yeah, and it’s not just regular old “I’m so mad I could commit vigilante justice” like most people would feel, but real, slimy vigilante justice that extends beyond passion and straight into premeditated murder and, I think, an international crime. This is probably not the Alex Cross that fans have come to know and love. But there’s far more wrong here than a terrible and fairly horrifying script featuring a brilliant genius hero who, in this case, is not brilliant, a genius, or a hero. Tyler Perry is hilariously miscast in the role of Alex Cross. He can’t act worth a damn in this context. His grief and rage just come across as discomfort and a headache or maybe gas, and the harder he tries, the worse it gets. A scene in which Cross tries to comfort his grieving daughter is an unintentional howler. Those surrounding him can’t really act either – the kids who play his children are awful, Cecily Tyson is inexplicably bitchy as Alex’s mother, Edward Burns looks bored out of his mind, Rachel “Honey, I am so so so so so so so so so so so so so so sorry.” Nichols comes across as window dressing, the police captain (John C. McGinley from Scrubs) seems to think he’s in a comedy and is spoofing something. Matthew Fox, as the killer, does seem to try creating something memorable but he ends up in the same comedy that McGinley is working on: a parody of a killer whose own motivations and techniques are all over the map, creating no sense of real mental disturbance. Maybe he really was thinking, “Well I lost all this weight, that ought to get the job done!” Poor Carmen Ejogo does a fairly good job when she appears all too briefly as Cross’s wife and then, well, you know what happens. As if a terrible story and terrible acting aren’t quite enough to make this an awful experience, there is bad camera work (shaky cam that comes and goes rather randomly, which renders scenes utterly incomprehensible and which at one point made me physically nauseous), bad editing (in multiple instances, people arrive in places with no logical explanation of how), crappy music throughout, bad special effects, and stupidly bad police “procedure” and cops who commit all manner of illegal acts while discharging their duties. There is a strange feeling of prejudice throughout, like the movie is stereotyping German and French people in a way that is not even sophisticated enough to feel really insulting – it just seems childish. There is nothing that goes right in this mess, not that I could see. You just wait until you see the list of “five things to like” I’ve tried to pull together: 1. Matthew Fox looks gnarly. 2. Rachel Nichols shows more emotion in this movie than she has in both seasons of Continuum. 3. There is a set-piece that seems to be an exquisitely-painted old opera house that now serves as a parking garage. It’s cool. 4. Matthew Fox’s car is gnarly. 5. What the hell does “gnarly” mean, anyway? When I use it referring to Matthew Fox’s appearance, I meant it in the traditional sense, as in, he appears as gnarled and rough as a tree trunk. Referring to his car, I’m using it as in the popular 80’s slang, like a surfer exclaiming, “Dude, that was one gnarly wave.” You see, here at The Movie Orphan, we’re all about the learning. Also, here’s another joke about Matthew Fox in this movie. He looks a little “Lost.” HAHAHAHAHA Would I side with the 12% who think this is worth seeing? Hell no. And I do wonder what the appeal was for those poor kids. Was it the exquisitely painted parking garage? I bet it was the exquisitely painted parking garage. .