April 6, 2001 | If you dug out a copy
of Hackneyed Movie Plots and turned to the chapter titled "Cat
and Mouse Games," you might read something like this: "An
egomaniacal mastermind executes a spectacular crime, then taunts his
celebrated pursuer with cryptic clues and bold challenges..." And
then you'd flip the page.
If
you go to your friendly neighborhood megaplex this weekend, you may
notice something on the marquee called Along Came a Spider.
A follow-up to Kiss the Girls, the film deals with an egomaniacal
mastermind who executes a spectacular crime, then taunts his celebrated
pursuer with cryptic clues and bold challenges.
Take
my advice: Flip the movie.
Even
with the estimable Morgan Freeman reprising his Kiss role as
Alex Cross, a Washington D.C. police detective, forensic psychologist
and best-selling true-crime author, Spider is a singularly junky
piece of claptrap. It begins with a premise that strains your credulity,
then builds toward a climax that insults your intelligence. Along the
way, it introduces the kind of stunningly illogical plot twist that
you normally find only in made-for-video B-movies where Michael Pare
takes out a gun and Shannon Tweed takes off her blouse. Like Kiss,
this low-voltage thriller is based on a novel in the popular series
by James Patterson. I haven't read any of these books, but I can only
assume that, in the case of Spider, something important - like,
maybe, common sense? - got lost in the translation from page to screen.
The movie begins, unpromisingly, with Cross retreating
into retirement and self-doubt after losing his partner in an ill-fated
sting operation. Naturally, it takes only a spectacular crime - along
with a few cryptic clues and a couple of bold challenges - to shake
him out of his blue funk. Quick cut to Cathedral School, a Washington,
D.C. private academy, where Secret Service agent Jezzie Flannigan (an
uncomfortably miscast Monica Potter) is the on-site guardian for Megan
Rose (Mika Boorem), the pretty young daughter of a U.S. Senator (Michael
Moriarty). You might ask yourself: How long has the Secret Service been
guarding the children of U.S. Senators? The answer: Obviously, not long
enough to be very good at the job.
Megan
is kidnapped, more or less under Jezzie's nose, by Michael Soneji (Michael
Wincott), a computer science instructor. As Soneji spirits the girl
away in his van, you might pause to ask another question: Wouldn't a
place like Cathedral School - which counts among its other celebrity
students the son of the Russian ambassador - do a better job of running
background checks on its teachers? And while you're raising issues that
the filmmakers would prefer you to ignore, you also could ask: Why didn't
Jezzie, the other security personnel or even the more observant students
ever notice Soneji's generously applied, but transparently fake, makeup?
Were they simply being polite, or what?
After
he returns to his yacht, stashes Megan below deck and strips the latex
from his face, Soneji gets down to serious business: The kidnapper calls
Alex Cross, and says, in effect, "Nyah, nyah, nyah! You can't catch
me!" Alex rises to the challenge with unflappable aplomb. Breezily
ignoring matters of protocol and jurisdiction, he also accepts Jezzie
as his partner in crimesolving, figuring that, like him, she needs a
shot at redemption. One thing leads to another, but not quickly enough,
and Soneji learns the hard way that it's not a good idea to yank Alex's
chain. Then the movie really starts to go downhill.
Working from a slapdash screenplay by Marc Moss,
director Lee Tamahori (The Edge, Once Were Warriors) generates
modest suspense during a long ransom-drop sequence. Otherwise, he simply
goes through the motions. The supporting players are a mostly bland
lot. But Morgan Freeman, an actor with the eyes of someone who's endured
a lifetime of bad news and hard knocks, once again is quietly and charismatically
authoritative as Alex Cross. Both the actor and the character deserve
a much better movie. So do you.