Review: "Alex Cross"

An aggressively dumb drama/thriller, "Alex Cross" clumsily retraces the steps of other movies about lawmen hunting down depraved serial killers who taunt them along the way. With its simplistic characterizations and clunky dialogue, it makes you think of  "Se7en" or "In the Line of Fire" as remade by a bunch of 15-year-olds ... and not particularly talented 15-year-olds.

Morgan Freeman played the role of Alex Cross, a brilliant African-American psychologist/detective, in a pair of middling 1990s adaptations of the novels by James Patterson.

Tyler Perry has a less intellectual, more visceral take on the character. That's a great idea in theory, but his ham-fisted performance results in a guy who seems all over the map -- hot and cold, a paragon of righteousness one minute, a rule-busting vigilante the next. He doesn't seem so much a person as a conflation of emotional highs and lows.

Perry, known for putting on a dress as the wild-and-crazy grandma Madea in a string of comedies he wrote and directed, just isn't convincing in a grim lead role. The audience in the preview screening I attended tittered several times at moments that were intended to be serious.

They also were amused by his, ah, ample physique struggling through a number of fight scenes. Director Rob Cohen doesn't help, resorting to the usual hackery of quick edits, tight framing and a shaky camera. The final showdown between Cross and the villain should be enshrined in film schools everywhere as how not to shoot an action scene.

Speaking of that villain -- Matthew Fox is the film's one redeeming quality as Picasso, a mysterious killer who's a hired assassin but clearly relishes his gruesome trade more than a cool professional would. Looking like every ounce of fat has been boiled off his lean frame, Fox flashes a death's-head rictus grin that is truly unsettling. He seems like he wants to shiver his way out of his own skin.

The character's backstory is never really explored -- we see a newspaper clipping that says something about a rapist, and Picasso (he's never otherwise named) repeatedly blames Cross for turning him into what he is. But the screenplay by Marc Moss and Kerry Williamson doesn't follow through.

Their transcendently awful dialogue is truly something to behold. It's as if every time the characters are faced with a situation somebody asked, "Now what's the most obvious thing he/she would say here?"

For instance, when Picasso applies his sordid trade to Cross' family and he starts gearing up for revenge, his mother (Cicely Tyson) lectures him: "Look at you! Self-appointed judge, jury and executioner!"

Secondary characters are strictly by-the-numbers, like Edward Burns as Cross' laconic partner/best friend, the scrappy supportive wife (Carmen Ejogo) and the smarmy corporate types who sneer at the cops even as the lawmen protect them from being carved up by Picasso.

A bundle of clichés wrapped in heaping helping of awful sauce, "Alex Cross" is a total flop as Tyler Perry's crossover to serious moviemaking. Better dust off that oversized dress.

1.5 stars out of four

Video review: "The Help"

I would not be surprised to see "The Help" get a raft of Academy Award nominations. Viola Davis and Octavia Spence seem like locks in the Best Supporting Actress Category, playing African-American maids struggling with racism and oppression in 1960s Mississippi. And Bryce Dallas Howard might just slide in there, too, as the catty queen bee of the white social establishment.

Emma Stone has a shot at a Best Actress nomination too, playing "Skeeter" Phelan, the recently graduated college woman and aspiring journalist who takes it upon herself to write about "the help" -- black women who essentially raise the children of white well-to-do families, only to be rewarded with condescension and Jim Crow status quo when those young ones grow up into adults.

For that matter, writer/director Tate Taylor did a smart job translating the phenomenally popular book by Kathryn Stockett to the screen, taking syrupy chick flick material and turning it into a moving and surprisingly funny portrait of Southern womanhood, in all its gritty glory and brittle pettiness. An Oscar nomination might just be in his future, too.

Heck, for that matter, why not a Best Picture nod for "The Help"? How many other films have grabbed audiences this year like this one, leaving them rolling in the aisles and with tears on their cheeks? It's sure to be a big hit on video.

One disappointing note is that video extras are rather on the lean side. The DVD version comes only with a few deleted scenes and “The Living Proof” music video by Mary J. Blige.

Upgrade to the Blu-ray, and you add a few more deleted scenes, and two featurettes – a making-of documentary and a tribute to real-life maids of Mississippi.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 2 stars

Review: "The Help"

It's grown-up time. Summer has exhausted its silos of slo-mo explosions, CGI critters and second-rate super-heroes. So who's ready for a touching, serious film that should get attention come Oscar time?

"The Help," based on the popular book by Kathryn Stockett, is a look at the relationships between African-American maids in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s and the white families they work for. Written and directed smartly by Tate Taylor, it's a movie in the mold of weepy chick flicks, but with more brains and gumptions than we're used to.

Yes, it's the sort of film that looks at the plight of oppressed black characters through the eyes of a white protagonist, who swoops in to save them -- or at least fortifies their bravery enough to stand up for themselves.

But I found it to be a touching journey that manages to make most of the black and white characters relatable. And "The Help" has a surprisingly funny streak, in that tried-and-true laughing-through-the-tears way.

Viola Davis gives a knockout performance as Aibileen, the long-suffering maid to the Leefolt family. Her duties include cooking and cleaning, but her primary task is tending to the clan's offspring. By her own reckoning, Aibileen has raised 17 children, but "they always turn out like their mommas."

The greatest strength of "The Help" is in examining the sclerotic entrapment of the Jim Crow South, where black maids were adored by the children to whom they had a closer affection than their own parents, but who grow up to enforce the unspoken codes of segregation and subjugation.

It's easy to talk about the illogical mindset of that time and place, where people were terrified to deviate from the social norm because "that's the way things have always been." This movie brings the contradictions of the pre-civil rights era to full, fleshy life.

Emma Stone, who between "Easy A," "Crazy, Stupid, Love." and this film is quickly establishing herself as the most ambitious actress of her generation, plays Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, recently graduated from Ole Miss with ambitions of becoming a writer. She tackles the cleaning advice column in the local paper, but soon hatches a plan to tell the stories of "the help," the gray-uniformed maids who silently serve as the ties that bind the community.

Skeeter is initially motivated by selfish reasons: she feels ostracized by the women her age who have all gotten married already, and the beloved maid who raised her, Constantine (Cicely Tyson, in convincing aging makeup), has abruptly ended her decades-long service with the family without any explanation from her brittle mother (Allison Janney).

Skeeter's mother is less than subtle about her wish that her daughter would give up this crazy notion of a career and find a husband: "Your eggs are dying. Would it kill you to go on a date?"

But as the civil rights movement finally makes its way to Jackson, Skeeter joins forces with Aibileen to tell their stories in hopes of changing things, or at least bringing them to light.

The third leg of their triad of strength is Minny, played by Octavia Spencer, a woman whose spirit is indomitable, and whose cooking is the best in Mississippi. Minny instructs her teen daughter not to sass the white folks, but doesn't take her own advice.

The heavy of the film is Bryce Dallas Howard, the angelic-looking red-headed actress who shows plenty of brimstone as Hilly Holbrook, the queen bee of the social set who rules with a velvet fist. Hilly thinks of herself as compassionate because she wants to maintain the current social arrangement as benevolently as possible -- such as mandating separate bathrooms in white homes for the help, because "they carry different diseases than we do."

Hilly has a run-in with Minny that compels the latter to take her revenge with an act she comes to dub The Terrible Awful. Minny asks God's forgiveness for her sin, but doesn't seem very regretful about it.

An unexpected character is Celia Foote, a spitfire blonde who lives on the edge of Jackson and can't break Hilly's vice grip over the Junior League set. She's played by Jessica Chastain in a role that seems breathy and girly at first, but she finds some pluck through a growing bond with Minny.

"The Help" is like a heaping helping of comfort food mixed with a nutritional social message delivered without preachiness or schmaltz. What satisfying cinematic meal.

3.5 stars out of four