Along Came A Spider
He Hate Me
I want to make one thing perfectly, absolutely, crystal clear, right from the start.
I hate this movie.
I hate Along Came A Spider more than I hate broccoli, more than I hate the San Francisco 49ers, more than I hate the guy who stole my TV last year. I hate this movie more than I hate soccer games that end in scoreless ties, or Joaquin Phoenix, or the dress that Bjork wore to the Oscars. I hate this movie more than the townspeople who wouldn’t help Gary Cooper in High Noon, or Paul Reiser’s character in Aliens, or that blackjack dealer in Shreveport who took all my money last month without even acknowledging my presence. Because it’s the first week in April, I hate this movie worse than the 1040A form, worse than the Internal Revenue Service, worse than whoever decided that putting income and time restrictions on the student-loan interest deduction was a good idea. I hate this movie so much that I am filled with an inexplicable, burning desire to get married and have children just so that those children can grow up with the knowledge that Along Came A Spider is a horrible, awful movie, and with the desire to pass that knowledge to future generations. Along Came A Spider is worse than Battlefield Earth or Wild Wild West or anything with Richard Gere in it except for maybe Runaway Bride. This is one movie where all prints should be destroyed, all copies of the script should be torched, the producer and screenwriter and director should be sold into bondage, and the sets should be burnt to the ground and plowed with salt so that nothing can ever grow there again.
Along Came A Spider is derived from the thriller by James Patterson, in much the same way that sausage is derived from pigs, and a horrible, bloody mess ensues in either instance. If you’ve read the book at all — or any of the other Alex Cross books, or any detective novel ever written, or anything this side of The Little Engine That Could – you’ll be prepared to understand the sheer magnitude of just how awful this movie really is. The book and the movie both start with the idea that a criminal mastermind named Gary Soneji has infiltrated an exclusive Washington, D.C. private school, posing as a schoolteacher, for the purpose of kidnapping the child (children, in the book) of prominent parents, and only Doctor/Detective Alex Cross can track him down and put an end to his reign of terror. It’s almost a foolproof formula for a successful thriller, which gives you some sort of idea how foolish the people who made this movie must have been.
The script is weak, the dialogue is worse, the direction is nonexistent. The acting is as consistently uninspired and dull and monotonous as the constant rainfall. There are big gaping holes in the plot everywhere you look, hidden only by the glaring factual errors (the Secret Service does not routinely protect the children of Senators, one cannot buy hi-res web cameras on a teacher’s salary, much less a houseboat, a middle-aged man cannot run from the Watergate to Pennsylvania Avenue in under fifteen minutes, etc.). Almost every part — except for Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross — is horribly miscast. (For example, Michael Moriarity and Penelope Ann Miller are wasted in the roles of the grieving parents; they’d be better off as the FBI and Secret Service agents, respectively, and vice versa.) And the movie is curiously uninteresting and flat, with the only good action sequence taking place in the unnecessary opening scenes. It’s a thriller without thrills, a chiller without chills, and a thoroughgoing disappointment at every possible level.
And that doesn’t even begin to tell why I hate it so much.
I hate this movie because it has no faith in its source material. I don’t want to spend much time listing the 78,757 ways that the book is better than the movie — books usually are — but I would like to note the contemptible way that the screenplay diverges from the book. James Patterson is nobody’s idea of a great literary talent, but he does know how to write a coherent thriller, and his talents are completely wasted here. The movie routinely jettisons the plot twists supplied by the author, supplying lame inventions of its own that don’t work nearly as well, to the degree they work at all. For example, Patterson focuses primarily on his madman killer and the way that he outsmarts his opponents. In the movie, Gary Soneji (Michael Wincott) is a fairly dim bulb; all his good lines and good exploits are gone. Instead, the movie prefers to focus on the little kidnapped girl (Mika Boorem), and in a shameless pander to the preteen audience, the movie makes her into a heroine, a little Countess of Monte Cristo, forsooth. Where the movie does borrow from Patterson, it chooses the wrong book, the scenes where the ransom is dropped is stolen from the recent Roses Are Red.
I hate this movie because of what it does to the Alex Cross character. People who aren’t fans of the character or the series probably won’t notice, but the movie strips away everything that makes the character unique and interesting and special. All the supporting characters we’ve come to know and care about (and who were present in Kiss The Girls, the prior Alex Cross movie) are missing; there’s no Nana Mama, no Damon and Jannie, no John Sampson. Nobody. The movie has Alex building model boats, of all things. The character in the movie is not brilliant or even smart but phenomenally lucky; he doesn’t have any psychological insights (every time he’s asked for one, he says, “I don’t know”) but, for some reason, killers just love to sidle up to him and give him information. Also, I don’t think that there’s one line that Alex is given in the movie that’s out of the book; he’s given dialogue that’s unnatural. And there’s no sense of style or purpose or sadness about the character; none of the things that makes Alex Cross what he is. Along Came A Spider could have gotten away with a generic plot; there’s no way it could have gotten away with a generic main character.
And I hate this movie because it makes me dislike Morgan Freeman for taking the part. I am a huge fan of Morgan Freeman. The Shawshank Redemption and Lean On Me and Glory are three of my favorite movies ever. And I went out of my way to say nice things about him in Nurse Betty and Deep Impact and Amistad, and would even be willing to defend him in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I even kept my mouth shut after Hard Rain and Chain Reaction. But I cannot be silent. I have to face the truth. Morgan Freeman is really, really, really bad in this movie.
There, I said it. I feel terrible, too, just terrible, you have no idea.
There is more to be said — how poor the acting is generally, how the supremely attractive Monica Potter (Con Air) should never be given another line of dialogue again in anyone’s movie, how the movie telegraphs its major plot twist, how the fate of the main villain is resolved. However, it should be enough for me to say, again, that I hate this movie, I hate this movie, I hate, hate hate this movie, more than you’ll ever know.