Along Came a Spider (2001)

Truly Dreadful Film

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The only reason this film was enjoyable was because Morgan Freeman is in it and James Patterson wrote the book the script is based on. This film has a lot of flaws which I will discuss but first I must just focus on the few good things to get them out of the way. Morgan Freeman is great in this film. He is very believable as Alex Cross and does a great job of playing a criminal profiler. The reason he plays it so well is due to his retrospective, calm but analytical voice that he uses in all of his films to great effect. His voice gives the impression of great wisdom and endless patience which is what a good detective must have.Freeman's facial expressions, too, are spot on for the scenes he is in and give a gravitas to his performance that only a great actor can give. There are a few little things like he is slightly too old for the character and he has a few lines that fall flat but on the whole I enjoyed his performance.The plot of the movie is good as well and does follow very close to the excellent book it is based on. I have been a fan of the Alex Cross series for a while and this movie does capture the Patterson style of suspense and thrillingness that we expect from anything relating to this series (thrillingness is not a word but screw you it is my review).The Problem with this film is every other actor involved is weak. This film has some very wooden performances and terrible actors who emote nothing and add nothing to the scenes they are in. Dylan Baker is terrible in this film. His character has no emotion what so ever and is just so bland on screen that I find every scene he is in to be BLEH. The problem is that Baker is only good for playing small roles like in Spiderman 3 where he is in it for 30 seconds. When you put him in longer scenes you can tell how much of a poor actor he is. I think it is best to put him in a short cameo or TV show but not a full length film. He just can't act realistically. Monica Potter as Flannigan is just terrible and does nothing for the characters persona at all. The sad thing is that in the book she was a much more interesting character that I really liked and wanted to see her done right on film. Every emotion she does is unconvincing and really makes me feel a bit embarrassed for her. She only has one emotion and that is "dumbfounded curiosity" which gets a bit draining after seeing it 50,000,000 times. I was hoping for something a bit more real from her character and Potter just failed to deliver.Child actors in this are a very mixed bag. On one side you have a young Anton Yelchin playing an okay role as a school boy who is semi important to the plot. On the other hand you have Mika Boorem playing an unconvincing captured kid that is just boring to watch and unconvincing. However this did not ruin the film for me as I do not expect much from child actors as they can all be rubbish in film unless directed diligently. The technical side of things is disappointing. Obviously the music is just stock music that they bought of a company and it completely shows. Its not BAD music it is just very cookie cutter and does some scenes a disservice by being too stilted and not framing a scene in the right light. The colour palet of the film is grey and dull with no imagination and the camera work is so still and undynamic in dynamic scenes that it takes me out of the film a bit.It is a shame but I suppose when you have a small budget of……WAIT $60,000,000!!!!?? WTF??? For $60,000,000 they could have made this movie so much better than it was. They could have spent much more on camera work, lighting, decent actors ETC. Where the $60,000,000 was spent I do not know but it is a shame that probably most of it went into Freemans pay.A GREAT film like Reservoir Dogs was made for $1,200,000 and that was shot better, looked better and had a better supporting cast than this movie. It just goes to show that with a great director the budget of a film can be small but still be enjoyable to watch and brilliant on every other level as well. This film is a decent film with a great plot and storytelling but what lets it down is the supporting cast, the useless music and the drab, colourless cinematography. Unfortunately no matter how much I love Morgan Freeman or the books of James Patterson it will not make me love this movie. I did enjoy this film but the flaws are reflected in the score I have given.

Watched the movie first and then listened to the audio book. Both are good and quite entertaining, but the movie is not even close to following the the book. Morgan Freeman is a great actor, but he is nothing close to the Alex Cross of the book series. What happens to the children is radically different between the movie and the book. It's almost 2 different stories.

Great movie."When you said you do what you are".The way Morgan freeman says it defines the entire movie.Suspense ,thrill ,action .You just don't get bored at all.The movie offers you so much be it great acting ,exceptional screenplay and a great story line.Of course it has its own glitches where a police officer is more capable than the entire FBI but then again if every thing was realistic in our movies they wont be called works of fiction.Its definitely worth a watch and its just not a "kill time" movie.Go for it!Highly underrated going by the ratings it has received!

An OK thriller, but nothing terribly original. As a mainstream detective film, it does quite well. It is well-acted by everybody, especially Michael Wincott. Though perhaps that is because he has one of the few characters with a bit of diversity (as well as Monica Potter perhaps). Morgan Freeman puts in a great performance as always, but his performance didn't comprise of as much as it should have. The character of Cross was fairly 2-dimensional.The plot is decent, only perhaps a tad ridiculous in places, with the killer laying out very, very obscure clues which he somehow assumed would be solved. The ending has a few nice twists and turns, but does leave a couple of unanswered questions.The main problems are that it isn't very original or creative and it is quite dull, for a thriller. Well, maybe not dull, but it just lacks any suspense or tension, probably because the villain is more likable than Cross. Certainly more interesting. A lot of the scenes involving Cross and the villain are almost lighthearted. I wouldn't go as far as to call it boring, because it's not. It just isn't very tense either.