Along Came a Spider

Associated Press (April 05, 2001)
Consider Little Miss Muffet. She’s sitting on her tuffet, minding her own business, eating her curds and whey. Spider comes along, sits down beside her, scares her away. Miss Muffet was lucky - she had plot, motive, and character development. The same cannot be said for Along Came a Spider, first-time screenwriter Marc Moss’ adaptation of another James Patterson novel that takes its title from a Mother Goose nursery rhyme.

The film, a prequel to 1997’s Kiss the Girls, stars Morgan Freeman, again slumming as criminal profiler Dr. Alex Cross.

Last time, Cross chased a serial killer who called himself Casanova and targeted perfect women. This time, he’s looking for a man who teaches at a private school for the children of Washington lawmakers and diplomats.

The teacher, Gary Soneji (Michael Wincott), has kidnapped one of his young students, Megan Rose (Mika Boorem), the daughter of a U.S. senator.

Why does he kidnap her? Good question. It may have something to do with Charles Lindbergh; it may have something to do with his own lousy childhood.

Or maybe he’s just using Megan to get to her classmate Dmitri, the son of the Russian president, whom he really wants to kidnap. Why does the son of the Russian president go to school in the United States? Another good question.

Cross gets help tracking Soneji from the Secret Service agent assigned to protect Megan, Jezzie Flanagan (Monica Potter). Jezzie gets to hold a gun and say such things as “I was trained to shoot first and think later.” Sandra Bullock was more convincing as an FBI agent-turned-pageant queen in Miss Congeniality.

Soneji drags Cross on a cat-and-mouse chase, playing a game of pay phone tag through the streets of D.C. that’s straight out of Die Hard With a Vengeance. Meanwhile, the other cops from various departments stand around in trench coats, eyeing each other suspiciously.

There are all kinds of double and triple crosses as the film staggers toward its end - twists that would be interesting if we knew anything at all about the characters. It’s hard to have an “aha!” moment when you don’t care who the “a-ha” is happening to.

Wincott’s Soneji is less than the average bad guy. He’s not fleshed out enough or crazy enough to inspire any real fear.

And besides, the twists make so little sense and are thrown together with such inconsistency, they’ll make your brain hurt if you bother trying to sort them all out.

Besides the audience, the real victims here are the actors. Freeman, doing double duty as executive producer, deserves a movie where his presence and weight as an actor belong.

Supporting players equally are wasted, including Michael Moriarty, who has received repeated Emmy nominations for TV’s “Law & Order;” Dylan Baker, who was so good as Robert McNamara in last year’s Thirteen Days; and Penelope Ann Miller, who got a Golden Globe nod for 1993’s Carlito’s Way but simply whimpers and stomps as Megan’s mother.

But feel really bad for the kid. Boorem is so strong and smart as Megan, and she was heart-rending last year as Mel Gibson’s daughter in The Patriot. She deserves better than the Miss Muffet role in this silly nursery rhyme movie.