Along Came A Spider

Along Came A Spider

A few loopholes I can forgive. But a plot full of them? A plot crippled by them? A plot made implausible by them? As in “Along Came a Spider,” then I have a problem with it. If Dr. Alex Cross is so smart, then why doesn’t he see that the story he finds himself in has giant logic holes in it? Dr. Cross (Morgan Freeman) is a Washington police detective and also a famous forensic psychologist whose textbook is used as teaching material by other policemen.

At the beginning of the film, he loses his partner because of one of those scenes where you go, “whoa, I didn’t know they had that kind of technology.” A female cop has a tiny camera hidden on her person which takes a TV signal from the killer who’s driving around in his car and relays it to Cross in a helicopter all of which makes you wonder if there isn’t some way we could be arresting this guy at less taxpayer expense.

After this chase, Cross falls into depression and spends his time building model boats until his phone rings and it’s another diabolical killer who again has set up an intricate cat and mouse game for the detective to play. In Washington, killers never just want to murder somebody; they always want to construct elaborate puzzles for Cross.

Nobody calmer or more serious than Morgan Freeman; nobody better at saying things like, “He’s really after somebody else.” Freeman was brilliant at unraveling the diabolical pattern in “Seven” (1995), and that movie’s success led directly to “Kiss the Girls” (1997), which was splendid and where he first played Alex Cross, the hero of six James Patterson novels now. In “Girls,” he intuited that the madman wasn’t killing his victims but collecting them; here comes another one who has read too many Pattersons.

I’ll be careful not to give away surprises, since the movie has one every five minutes as a strategy to distract you from asking certain questions. The film opens with a strangling and a kidnapping at an exclusive private school. Because the hostage is the daughter of a senator, the Secret Service is called in, and Cross finds himself working with Agent Jezzie Flannigan (Monica Potter), who found time for a career despite a lifetime of telling people how her name is spelled.

The students at this school have computer monitors at every desk, and their teacher challenges them to see who can find Charles Lindbergh’s home page in the fewest clicks answer: Go to Google, type in “Lindbergh,” get 2,260 results, discover he doesn’t have one. Kids their age are already creating viruses to bring down Microsoft; why such a lame-brain exercise? Dr. Cross figures it out.

The Lindbergh page that he finds immediately out of 103,000 possibles has been put up by the kidnapper (or has it?) and includes a live cam shot whose resolution is so high that Cross can read the name on a bottle of pills. This clue plus the kidnapper’s insistence on communicating through him puts him on it and teams him with Agent Flannigan.

The movie ‘Kiss the Girls’ was directed by Gary Fleder and had a strong sense of time and place, primarily deep damp shadowy foreboding woods. Also full of atmosphere “Once Were Warriors” Lee Tamahori directs “Along Came a Spider,” which is set in the wettest dampest gloomiest part of any year. As Cross and Flannigan follow leads, we also see the kidnapper and his victim, and are filled with admiration for her imagination; she is able to escape, set fires, swim toward shore and perform other feats far more difficult than a Google search.

But then well, there’s not much more I can say without giving away astonishing surprises. There are two kinds of loopholes in this film: (1) Those that emerge when you think back on the plot; (2) Those that seem like loopholes at the time but are explained by later developments that may contain loopholes of their own.

There cannot be too much praise for Morgan Freeman as an actor. Maybe actors should win Oscars not for doing well in good movies but for surviving weak ones. The weight of his gaze, the stillness of his voice, make Dr. Cross intriguing even in scenes where all common sense has fled. And it looks good; Tamahori and cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti create location (admittedly they shot their Virginia exteriors in British Columbia, but still). Michael Wincott makes a satisfactory bad guy especially when his mastermind schemes start blowing up in his face.

But man-oh-man will you talk coming out of this movie! Saying “but why” and “if she” and “wouldn’t he” and “how come” as you try to track your way back along the plot’s twisted logic. Here’s an example question: Dr. Cross mentions a $12 million ransom and later explains that the person he was talking to should have known it was $10 million but never said anything. And I’m thinking, should that person even have known about the ransom at all? Well, maybe if but I dunno. There are places in this movie you can’t get to from other places in this movie.

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