If you haven't heard of Alex Cross, then you're either not big on reading fiction in general, or perhaps just not a fan of crime thrillers in particular. Either way, you probably won't be aware of author James Patterson, who is a phenomenon in the literary world; Patterson is currently the most successful author on the planet, and that title doesn't look like changing any time soon.

Not only do his books break records on release, he's also scarily prolific. At his current rate, there's a chance that every book ever released hereon in will have been written by him.

The Alex Cross character is one of his most popular, featuring in over twenty novels as he does. And this isn't his first foray into film either, as Morgan Freeman played him twice in 1997's Kiss the Girls and 2001's Along Came a Spider.

With a new actor taking on the lead role for this latest instalment, this reboot is clearly yet another attempt to make a library full of cash off of the Alex Cross name, and hopefully be the first of many more to come. But does this latest cinematic outing for the very smart detective pay due respect to his novel counterpart?

Working on the streets of Detroit is Detective Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) and his team consisting of best friend Thomas Kane (Edward Burns) and Monica Ashe (Rachel Nichols).

When an extremely rich and beautiful woman gets brutally murdered, her killer soon gets the attention of Cross and his team. It transpires that this is only the first of many killings planned by the killer, who goes by the name Picasso AKA The Butcher (Matthew Fox).

Just when Cross starts to get a feel for the killer with his highly tuned profiling skills, Picasso takes his killing spree to the next level, when he hits Cross closer to home.

Cross then embarks on a dangerous journey down a road that leaves professionalism well behind as the stakes get highly personal.

After Lost the roles soon dried up for Matthew Fox. He decided to change career, move to Yorkshire and is currently the country's no.1 gurning champion.

There are currently only two African American actors who can take the lead in a big-budget Hollywood flick without making producers nervous: Will Smith and Denzel Washington. The fact that these two must have turned the role down (assuming they were offered it in the first place, but let's face it, considering the previous statement, it's more than likely), it's a testament to the Alex Cross character that this reboot got off of the ground, especially when you consider that a relative unknown in Tyler Perry got the part.

And Perry certainly commands a presence on screen, albeit in a quietly spoken fashion. It's difficult to determine whether it's deliberate or not, but due to the whispery nature he delivers his lines, it's hard to distinguish when his character is being calm and placid from being in a complete and utter rage. So for that alone, it's a one note performance. He's not the film's biggest problem however.

Clearly James Patterson was far too busy counting all his money to be truly involved in this project, so the script was handed to a couple of relatively unknowns to write, and boy do they make a hash of it. Although the characters are fairly well fleshed out, the story – or more specifically, the lack of one – is a complete mess. Motive for any of the characters has been completely removed, so you're just left with a bunch of people moving from A to B, doing some stuff, and then moving to C. And it's that exciting.

It's director, Rob Cohen, whose most notable films on his CV appear to be 2001's The Fast and the Furious and 2002's xXx, is so remarkably out of his depth here it isn't even funny. It would be no surprise to learn that instead of actually reading any of the books, he merely got an assistant to mime them out for him to give him the gist of it. If that's the case, they really should have given the assistant a stab at directing, as he couldn't have done any worse.

The one area that sparks some interest is in the casting of Matthew Fox. Having spent a number of years as the heroic lead on TV's Lost, he's taken the somewhat brave step in playing the baddie. Not only that but he goes a little method by losing a bit of weight and looking so gaunt that he looks like he's suffering from a terminal illness. To his credit, there's not a trace of Jack about him as he revels in the darkness of this character.

Thankfully the film was an utter box office flop, but whether that's enough to deter Hollywood attempting to squeeze more mileage out of the Alex Cross franchise is another thing. If they do , then the director and writers will have to 'disappear', like so many of the characters from James Patterson novels do, for it to have any chance at all of surviving.