'Alex Cross' review: A real cop-out (half a star)

After examining the fingerless body of a dead prostitute, keen-eyed detective Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) starts thinking. Within seconds he spits out this profile: "He wants to make somebody hurt. I don't know who. Maybe his mother."

No kidding, Sherlock. The guy who sold Cross his morning doughnut could have whipped up a smarter hypothesis, but then just about any schmo on the street could have made a better movie than "Alex Cross," an uncommonly awful action-thriller that fails on absolutely every level. It feels almost cruel to laugh at such a blindly stumbling, dunderheaded action-thriller, but you won't be able to help it.

"Alex Cross" is a follow-up to "Kiss the Girls" and "Along Came a Spider," two lurid genre-flicks classed up by Morgan Freeman as the forensic psychologist created by novelist James Patterson. This time, Cross is tracking a killer nicknamed Picasso (Matthew Fox, all buggy eyes and manic giggles), who left behind a drawing once but otherwise has no clear motivation or back story. He's one of several stock characters, including Cross' loyal partner, Thomas (Edward Burns); some ill-used women (Rachel Nichols, Carmen Ejogo), and an oily foreign businessman (Jean Reno). Cicely Tyson, who's been in several Perry films, plays Cross' no-nonsense mother.

Perry, best known for his rowdy "Madea" comedies, replaces Freeman's poise and intelligence with cop-show fight moves and spluttering bluster ("I will hunt you down like a rabid dog!"), which is in keeping with this clumsy movie's M.O. Rob Cohen ("The Fast and the Furious") directs so sloppily that the stuntmen look like stuffed dummies, and the script (by Mark Moss and Kerry Williamson) is a stew of undercooked ideas, some lifted from past Cross movies.

"It ain't over," Cross says ominously after the film's anticlimax. You guessed it: There might be a sequel.