Kiss the Girls (1997)

Kiss the Girls arrives from 1997 with the exhausted confidence of a genre that had recently discovered it could be profitable and respectable at the same time. Gary Fleder directs James Patterson's novel as a bicoastal manhunt, and the machinery is familiar: a forensic psychologist, a masked abductor who calls himself Casanova, a second killer competing for the same terrible market. Morgan Freeman plays Alex Cross with the patience of a man who has read the script and decided to rise above it. The result is competent, grim, and largely indistinguishable from a dozen other procedurals of the decade.

On the matter of representation, the film casts Freeman as its anchor and fills out the ranks with Bill Nunn and Richard T. Jones, which in 1997 counted as unremarkable progress. Race is never a subject here. Cross's competence is simply assumed, and the film moves on, which is its own kind of statement, or its own kind of silence. Ashley Judd's Kate McTiernan is a doctor and a kickboxer who overpowers her captor and leaps off a cliff to freedom, and she is genuinely the most resourceful person on screen. Yet the plot's fuel is the abduction and torment of women, and Judd herself has since said the film is about male sexual violence as entertainment. She is not wrong. The empowerment is real. The exploitation is realer.

Everything else registers as nothing at all. There are no LGBTQ+ characters, no climate concerns, no critique of capital (the villains are lone psychopaths, not systems), no body-positivity themes, no neurodivergent characters, no historical revisionism, and no sermonizing. The film wants to thrill, not instruct. It is a relic of a moment when a thriller could be just a thriller, and the culture has since decided that this is not quite enough.