Acebikerchick What I gained from watching: Tyler Perry is no Morgan Freeman. Tyler Perry looks like a clown. Tyler Perry when frowning looks like a frowning clown. Tyler Perry when angry looks like Pennywise. Edward Burns totally steals all the scenes when he and TP are together. Jean Reno is now fat but still kinda sexy, in a French Ray Winstone kinda way. Nana Mama really needs to be recast. Tyler Perry does not look like a young Muhammed Ali. It doesn't matter if you change a characters skin colour just as long as it fits with the mixed up version of the book. All in all I give it 4 out of 10 eggs.....

Andrew Gold It's not hard to figure out what's wrong with this movie. Skeptics may think Tyler Perry was a bad choice to fill in a young Morgan Freeman's shoes but he was absolutely fine in the role. Plus, Matthew Fox as a psychopathic skinhead assassin? Hell yes. Edward Burns as Perry's detective partner? Eh, less convincing but I'll let it slide. The direction and the writing though... whew. It's amazing the actors were able to recite this dialogue with a straight face.The story of Alex Cross is a simple murder mystery - Alex Cross and his partner investigate the scene of a crime and discover that they're after a professional killer referred to as Picasso. Then things get personal and Cross plans to seek his revenge once and for all. Standard crime thriller plot, right? The problem is when the characters start talking to each other. Honestly, it's laughable how bad some of this dialogue is, especially between Cross and his family. They throw in these "emotional" scenes to break up the action but all they do is make for a really awkward paced movie. It would be passable if the dialogue actually moved the plot forward but it doesn't, at all. There are some subplots that are introduced and never brought up again. Like Alex Cross becoming an FBI agent. What was the point of even including that?The main reason to watch this movie is for Matthew Fox. He's playing a sadist who is "fascinated by pain." Not very original but who cares, it's Matthew Fox playing a 130 pound untamable psychopath. The scenes in which we see him doing his job - stalking his targets, infiltrating their houses, taking out their body guards and whatnot - are the most interesting parts of the movie. He's really the only character given a clear cut motive and enough development to make him a decent antagonist. He's also batsh*t crazy, did I mention that? Yeah, he's a lot of fun to watch.Unfortunately Perry isn't given nearly as much to work with. He's a generic detective masquerading under the name Alex Cross who acts as a poor man's Sherlock Holmes. His whole objective is to get into the mind of this madman while trying to maintain a steady family life, but instead of building tension between these two factors and having them play off one another and ultimately effecting Cross' personal life, the writer/director think it's more effective to jump from one setting to another with no lead-ins or relevance to what just happened or what is about to happen. The family scenes are cringeworthy, and even the dialogue with his partner gets really cheesy. I wanted to see more psychological warfare between Cross and Picasso. They try to do that in a couple scenes but it's so poorly written that you don't believe a word of it.Tyler Perry's acting shines in a few scenes. He's certainly a capable dramatic actor and anyone who says otherwise is talking out of their ass. Thankfully I haven't seen the Madea movies so I had no prior opinion of Perry but he won me over with this. Mind you, some of his lines sound forced and awkward but that's completely on the scriptwriters. It's just impossible to be drawn to the character, and you'd think with a title like Alex Cross that we'd get a deep look into the mind of the title character, but instead they spoon-feed us this cheesy soapy dialogue and the occasional battle-of-wits with the villain that isn't the least bit intriguing. Also, the climax of this movie, if you can even call it that, is laughable. The fight scene is probably the worst camera work I have seen in an action movie. You can hardly see what's going on half the time, and once it ends you're just like, okay. Is that it?Again, the leads save this movie from being a total bomb. I was admittedly entertained for a good portion of the movie despite its stupid dialogue. None of it is inventive or new; it's just your run-of-the-mill murder mystery that is low on thrills and high on cheese. Worth a one time watch if it's on TV or something, but really the main thing you'll remember from Alex Cross is the criminally wasted talent.

italianredneckgirl ***Contains Spoilers****** I have been a fan of the Alex Cross series since the very beginning. I was shocked when we found out the ending in Big Bad Wolf and waited and waited for these movies to start rolling in. First, Tyler Perry, come on! Where was James Patterson when castings were auditioned for? Alex Cross was clearly more of a,the late, Michael Clark Duncan, Denzel role. But anyone, anyone other than Tyler Perry. Frankly, the entire movie was cast inappropriately. And the spots where it's clear, the screen writing was trying to cram Cross' entire back-story into 1 movie, was sloppy at best. Not true to the integrity of Patterson's fast-paced, page turning fervor we are accustomed to. The only hope is that they aren't making any more.

coltens14 By the time this film was available on DVD in early 2013, two more books - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross & Alex Cross, Run - will have been released, The films have not been nearly as steady, only getting its third cinematic treatment and the first since 2001's Along Came a Spider. Patterson's busily stalked protagonist did fairly well at the box office if not inspiring critics into believing he was worth following for another eighteen adventures. Fans of Patterson's airport fiction might disagree despite whatever objections they had between the films and the varying text. New fans are being sought out for the franchise reboot though and they should be mostly pleased. Considering they are used to ham-handed acting, amateurish fimmaking, cartoonish villains, hypocritical motivations and a touch of old broad sass, they should be right at home watching Tyler Perry take the lead.As the new era begins, Alex Cross is once again chasing down another psychopath and saving a battered white girl. Along with his select team, childhood friend Tommy Kane and Monica Ashe - Who are secretly hooking up behind the boss' back - they investigate crimes of some unspecified nature in the greater Detroit area. Their special unit is hardly defined by anything other than Alec being such a master of deduction that he can tell his wife had coffee based on the blouse stain big enough to be spotted by a Fisher Price telescope from Pluto. Other than dealing with the occasional crime scene, life is good for "Detective Doctor" Alex Cross who is on the short list for an FBI job in Washington and he has just been told there's another little Cross on the way.Also on the way is another psycho. This one, played by Matthew Fox, is a professional assassin who calls himself "The Butcher" but is referred to as "Picasso" by Tommy based on him leaving a drawing at at recent upscale massacre. There is a mystery benefactor behind The Butcher's recent spree which includes getting into underground MMA fights, paralyzing women with a special drug, and concocting elaborate break-ins to take out a French financial specialist. When Cross and Co. disrupt the latter, The Butcher takes to being bullet-grazed worse that being punched in the face.There is a momentary fascination with the film in figuring out precisely what Fox's psychotic villain is really up to. How does buying one's way into a brutal fight connect to a stolen laptop, what's on it and how it leads to international finance? Just who is Jean Reno's one-scene millionaire is not only superfluous suspect available to be funding The Butcher? Do professional mercenaries go off-script so often to take on personal vendettas after getting a little boo-boo from their adversary For ever answer revealed in Alex Cross - and few are really offered - it opens up ten different logical conundrums over just how brilliant the particular cat and mouse really are. Loosely based on Patterson's prequel novel Cross, the screenplay by first-timer Kerry Williamson and Marc Moss - whose only previous credit is the adaptation of Patterson's Along Came a Spider - actually gets less complicated and more boring as things get pieced together. What begins as a ludicrous police procedural becomes an even more ludicrous revenge thriller that asks viewers to believe this morally-principled Sherlock-wannabe is not just ready to turn into The Punisher but also possesses the superskills necessary for an over-weight, out-of-shape, dopey, doughy detective to take on a cage fighter who overreacts to taking a single punch. There has not been a less convincing avenging angel that Tyler Perry's Alex Cross since Thomas Jane portrayed the comic world's Frank Castle by interrogating a suspect with a melting popsicle.The stakes in Alex Cross are raised even further with the kind of vengeful horror that most professional assassins would admit is against the code. Both of the Taken films pushed the boundaries of the ratings system but did so under a kind of unwritten guide that throat-punching is less graphic than the more macho-violent fare that Sylvester Stallone has done in his Rambo and Expendable films. Alex Cross will never be confused with those, but its violence is shocking for an MPAA-rated "PG-13" mystery thriller. The connection between sexual fetish and murder is pushed during a torture scene. No less that two other crimes are committed towards women with one worthy of a funeral and the other nothing more than a cell phone snapshot. Patterson's specialty of bruising-up the fairer sex received an "R" rating when Kiss the Girls came out. Fifteen years later, viewers are apparently so numb that it can be extrapolated even while being dumbed down for those used to Perry's cartoonish portrayals of man-on-woman crimes.All such shocking moments of Alex Cross could be all part of some calculated plan for Perry to prove that he is going hard in trying to prove what a serious, demonstrative actor he can be. Most would recommend a stint in acting classes for starters which co-star Matthew Fox is more than happy to teach. First lesson: Act with the eyes. Bug them out as far as possible to prove the depth of the character's villainy. The originally cast Idris Elba as Cross would have had to take the class on keeping a straight face in the middle of this nonsense. Lesson two goes to director Rob Cohen. With no competency as an action director and stars was wooden as Perry and Burns, shake the camera as much as humanly possible to justify urgency. James Cameron could not make a call to OnStar more dramatically riveting. Mainly because he would never create and action sequence around a call to OnStar. Alex Cross is equally silly, boring, offensive and implausible which are also its best qualities if the viewer is in a mocking kind of mood.