When his niece goes missing, detective Alex Cross (Morgan Freeman) is drawn into the hunt for a killer who is collecting women who fit his specific idea of perfection.
When Kate (Ashley Judd) escapes the killer, Cross partners with her to find the killer and rescue the other women he has kidnapped before it is too late.
I read Kiss The Girls last year. I have never read James Patterson before, but the premise sounded interesting and I think was fooled by the fact that it had been made into a movie.
I have now watched Kiss The Girls and I feel the same way about the movie: the premise sounded interesting and I was definitely hoodwinked by the assumption that the movie would be better than the book.
Kiss The Girls is the kind of potboiler that makes for a good genre movie - take the premise and the characters, strip out any extraneous stuff and flesh it out. As a cinematic thriller, Kiss The Girls comes off a bit inert.
This whole movie feels like a desiccated meal. All the components are there, but it needs water and heat to expand.
I have a hard time pinpointing what is off about Kiss The Girls. The pace never racks up and the tension is never really there. There are sequences which should be scary, but they never quite pick up the way the filmmakers think they do.
With regards to the book, I found the characters uninteresting and plot over-complicated. The movie does a pretty good job of translating the story, but the only real improvement is the performances by Freeman and Judd, who make Cross and Kate credible.
Judd has a potentially meaty role as a woman who refuses to be defined by her experience. This is an interesting idea, particularly when most of the men around her seem to want to write her off, or bundle her away. This feels like a teaser for a more nuanced and deeper character study, and this movie is not that interested in building on Kate in a way that does not fit the formulaic plotting.
As far as the filmmaking goes, it is fairly by-the-numbers. There a couple instances of slow motion which come off as cheesy rather than effective (Double Jeopardy suffers from a similar use of the technique). Overall, I found the aesthetic of Kiss The Girls more interesting as an artefact, the fossil of a genre that has more-or-less migrated off the big screen to the small one, mostly in the form of the Law & Order spinoff SVU or Criminal Minds.
There is probably interesting essay in there, but it will take a meatier movie than this one to get me to delve into it.
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