Alex Cross

Box-office grosses in the US suggest there’s an endless appetite for movies featuring actor Tyler Perry as the character of Madea, an oversize African-American woman: as seen in films like ‘Meet the Browns’ and ‘Madea Goes to Jail’. But were audiences clamouring to see Perry as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Charles Bronson? Alex Cross is the profiler and hero of James Patterson’s novels and is described as a guy who can tell what you ate for breakfast from 100 yards away. This sensory genius meets his match in a ‘stimulus-seeking, sociopathic narcissist’ killer (an emaciated, lizard-like Matthew Fox) who’s targeting corporate bigwigs. After Cross takes a stab at psychoanalysing him during one of their sporadic phone chats, things gets personal. In drag or out of it, the soft-spoken star has rarely been less convincing than when locking and loading from his home arsenal or dangling from a decaying Detroit edifice.