The rest of the supporting cast—and there are some good names here—are no better. Jean Reno plays a wealthy businessman of some sort, but doesn't get to do much other than make you wonder what happened to that guy from The Professional. Carmen Ejogo is Marcia Cross, Alex's wife, and if you don't know where her role is headed from the moment she appears you may never have seen a movie before. Even she appears to know where the role is headed and seems to simply be awaiting her juicier moments. John C. McGinley is the chief of police who is running for mayor and, like Perry, never seems sure if he should be going for funny or serious. Neither Rachel Nichols nor Cicely Tyson nor Giancarlo Esposito have the ability to raise their characters—and perhaps the movie—over the broadest of stereotypical police thriller characters.
As for plot, well forget it. It isn't just paint by numbers, it's barely painted at all. It follows a well worn, not terribly detailed, map from the opening action sequence to establish our good guy to the time the credits start to roll. Mercifully, at 101 minutes in length it doesn't take all that long for those credits to begin.
I like pulp fiction and dime store mystery thrillers as much as anyone, and there is absolutely no need for every single movie to think completely outside the box and give us something we haven't seen before. However, if you're going to go down an oft-trodden path, the movie needs to be done well. Have a good action sequence, have characters that make sense on their own rather than with what the audience brings to the film (as they've seen its ilk before), shoot it in an interesting fashion, connect the dots of the story rather than shooting scenes that might be "cool" but aren't. Do something. Give the audience a reason to leave the theater and think to themselves, "Oh sure, I knew what was going to happen but the way they did it was great." Alex Cross offers none of that, it just skips along from one moment to the next, one scene to the next, hoping that the actors won't break out in hysterics and that the audience's expectations that it has to get better will keep them in their seats.
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