Alex Cross (2012)

Alex Cross arrives in the manner of a vintage left too long in the cellar: a 2012 reboot of a franchise that had already gone quiet for a decade, pressed into service by a director with a long history of loud noises and short attention spans. The film casts Tyler Perry, an entertainer better known for wigs and moral instruction, as the cerebral detective of James Patterson's long-running series. The result is a Black-led thriller with a predominantly Black principal cast, a fact that owes less to any cultural program than to the source material, which has always centered a Black hero. We can acknowledge the representation without pretending it was engineered.

The remainder of the exercise is largely barren ground for the contemporary social catalog. Two women of note are tortured and killed to fuel the grief of the men around them, a device so old it predates the talkies. The villain, a contract killer who draws charcoal sketches of his victims, is offered as psychosis in its purest form, a diagnosis deployed as shorthand for evil. A corrupt businessman drifts through the plot, permitting a faint suggestion that wealth is sinister, though the film has no interest in following that thought anywhere. The Detroit setting sits there, unexamined. Race, policing, and the city's actual history are present as scenery and nothing more.

What remains is a blunt procedural, competently staged and almost entirely devoid of instruction. It does not lecture. It does not moralize. It does not ask the audience to examine its conscience. It asks only that we watch a man grieve and then punch a man in a church. There is something almost restful in that. The film was panned, lost money, and killed its own sequel, which is its own kind of verdict. We classify it, and we move on.