He's put away the wigs and oversized floral dresses, and now Tyler Perry wants you to consider him as a Serious Actor. And we'd love to, but unfortunately "Alex Cross" unintentionally looks like a parody of the cat-and-mouse crime thriller.
The first trailer for the film, based on the best-selling James Patterson novel, could be direct-to-DVD fare if you removed Perry and Matthew Fox, but even with them in it, it barely looks much better. Basically the story is this: a freaktacular-looking Fox plays one of those bad guys who is seemingly able to hatch well-planned schemes, each more fiendish than the last, and is taking a particular delight in targeting Cross, a D.C. detective who vows to bring him down. Rob Cohen directs with all the nuance and subtlety of the many explosions that happen in the trailer (it seems Fox's psychopath/UFC fighter? has a particular penchant for entering or leaving a room and creating a path of destruction) overall, this just plain looks ridiculous.
Looking like your average, run-of-the-mill late Saturday night cable thriller, "Alex Cross" opens on October 19th. Watch below.