Word: spidered
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Hollywood's ingenuity (or lack thereof) never ceases to amaze me. You can always count on a director to take a preposterous premise and make a mainstream movie out of it. Such is the case with Along Came A Spider, based on what I am sure is a fine, best-selling novel by James Patterson...
What makes Along Came A Spider such a travesty is the fact that it fails even at formula. Cross may be an expert profiler, but Soneji is no "spider"-only a deluded man with deluded dreams of fame. When he confronts Cross, crying and blaming his parents for not being there for him, his cheap trauma complex is enough to make anybody grimace in disgust. This supposedly cool, calculating kidnapper is nothing but a whiny little boy filled with self-pity. Now who wants someone like that to go down in history...
...wonder that the plot makes some wild swerves after this, trying to sidestep Soneji's pathetic whimpering and save Along Came A Spider from its inevitable demise. Unfortunately, the screenplay does not succeed-in fact, the movie is not even scary. Instead of relying on the actors' performances to convey tension and apprehension, director Lee Tamahori seems to be acknowledging the limited talents of his cast by inundating his audience with Jerry Goldsmith's overly ominous score...
...exacerbated by the clumsy adaptation, it looks like this shabby attempt at thrills and chills will be quickly relegated to the "been there, done that" pile. What with rampant murders, prosthetic faces, and a thermos full of diamonds thrown out a train window (don't ask), Along Came A Spider verges on the absurd. One would at least think that Freeman is talented and dependable enough to be able to choose better movies. Or maybe screenwriter Marc Moss just has to learn that what may be good on the page is not necessarily good when transferred to the screen...
...world is a scary place, and young kids are inherently fearful until they start to figure it out. If you are living with a generalized sense of danger, it can be profoundly therapeutic to find a single object on which to deposit all that unformed fear--a snake, a spider, a rat. A specific phobia becomes a sort of backfire for fear, a controlled blaze that prevents other blazes from catching. "The thinking mind seeks out a rationale for the primitive mind's unexplained experiences," says psychologist Steven Phillipson, clinical director of the Center for Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy...