Alex Cross (2012)

So, that's Tyler Perry. He doesn't really seem much like Martin Lawrence at all. Well, they did play a trailer for one of his Medea movies. But that was more like Eddie Murphy. I can handle Eddie Murphy, not so much the fan of Martin Lawrence though. Both Lawrence and Murphy are always at least a little bit comedian in their action films. Not so with Perry. I think they made a good choice.
The back of the DVD case says this is a James Patterson character, but I knew that because I have heard people talking about Alex Cross (the character, not this movie). What I didn't realize was that the pair of films starring Morgan Freeman - Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider - were also Alex Cross films. Because I am not a reader of the Patterson books, I don't know what order they are told in, so I don't know if he wrote a prequel book, or if this movie is a reboot of the series, which started much later in Cross's career. Perry's portrayal is certainly more action/adventure than Freeman's Cross. But, Perry is a younger man now than Freeman was then. I think I prefer the more cerebral version of Cross, I mean since his thing is that he's a hotshot psychologist as well as a detective. It would have been nice to see more of that, but as I'm not familiar with the book, maybe the point is that he's reacting to the villain. I did notice in the credits that James Patterson is a producer for this movie, so presumably it's "close enough" to the book to satisfy him.
This is not a remarkable movie. There is nothing, good or bad, that makes it stick out. But, it is a very competent movie, the whole way through. I would have liked this film to be a bit more of a police procedural, in other words I would like to see the Cross character do more profiling. It's good enough that I'll watch the sequel or number four depending on which way you count it.

Alex Cross on IMDb