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.
