ALONG CAME A SPIDER (2001) I'd have preferred a venomous spider My dad loves this movie. I'm not sure why. This is the sort-of followup to Kiss The Girls. Both movies are based on books by James Patterson, which I haven't read. I don't remember much of Kiss The Girls, except that it was a slick, well-made and effective (in kind of a forgettable way) psycho-hunt. Along Came A Spider features a lot of what make its predecessor work, but something's missing. Actually, a few things are missing. Morgan Freeman reprises his role as forensic psychologist Alex Cross. Freeman is one of those actors who, like Sean Connery, can get away with playing just about any role, uttering just about any line, because he's such a pleasure to listen to. He probably couldn't get away with playing Nell, but I bet he'd make a good Jedi Master. His re-introduction in this movie comes in the form of a disastrous sting operation which kills his partner in a hideously unconvincing CGI car crash. The notion of a CGI car crash makes more sense to me than all those CGI stunts in Blade II (and a bunch of them in Spider-Man too), but I just don't think we're there yet. I could've let this slide if this scene had another level of conflict, something else to worry about than the gimme of his partner dying. A senator's daughter is kidnapped right out of her posh private school, right out from under the nose of the Secret Service agent assigned to protect her (Monica Potter, who I always think of as Julia Roberts Junior). She spends much of the rest of the movie berating herself. We see the (pretty violent!) kidnapping of the girl in process - the foul fiend is none other than her teacher, who's been wearing lots of latex prosthetic makeup every day for class for a long time. He's obviously put some effort into this. What does he want? Why her? How is it that Secret Service hiring standards have plummeted so dramatically? So, enter Alex Cross, just the man you'd want working on the case of your kidnapped child, because when he tells you that the man who kidnapped her is a businessman and not a pervert, you believe it. Michael Wincott (whose face is getting more and more skull-like) is the faux teacher who hides the girl on his boat while phoning Cross to taunt him. If his methods later on seem a little less thought-out than the extensive planning we assume must've gone into the initial kidnapping, well, he does seem a little off his nut. "He's made it into a game", says Cross. There are a lot of movies out there where a diabolical villain intentionally involves his law-enforcing nemesis in his ultimate crime and devises an elaborate game for the policeman to solve/survive. To Along Came A Spider's credit, this is the first such movie I can think of where that game falls apart before the climax. There's little resonance in the danger the child is subjected to, partly because we don't much get to know the kid, also because her parents are relegated to background figures who are here mostly to give anguished looks to Cross. (just when a friend of mine was asking "Whatever happened to Penelope Ann Miller?") There are bad paths this movie starts to go down but it turns back before it's too late. Like the stock character whose only function is to be wrong about everything - he comes to his senses about halfway through and starts being useful. Or the way the game set up by the kidnapper falls apart long before it can devolve into a showdown between him and Cross involving an outrageously complex series of booby-traps and improbabilities. But overall, this feels less like a genuine, go-for-the-throat thriller than just another workmanlike, not-bad-but-nothing-special time-killer. It's too serious to be silly, yet too silly to be believable. It looks good, but needs some fire in its belly, and maybe a few corks in its plotholes. BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE