Sometimes you just want something that’s familiar, fun, bold and pacey. Not that a serial killer drama is fun in most senses, but as we all know, fun in a crime drama sense means something a bit different.
Cross is an eight-episode series adapted from megastar crime novelist, James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels. We’re getting a lot of eponymous series at the moment, with titular detectives at their heart. Cross is the next cab off the rank.
Cross stars Aldis Hidge and has a lot of familiar character traits. He’s big, bold and confident, and is coming to terms with a traumatic incident in his life – the (unsolved) murder of his wife at a beachside restaurant. A year on, he’s still suffering and struggling (as anyone would). So now isn’t the right time to take on a politically sensitive murder case.
Black Lives Matter activist Emir Goodspeed is found dead in his car. An ex-gang banger, suspicion from the Washington DC force is that it’s just another drug death. Cross feels differently – Goodspeed’s dreads have been shaved off, and his last meal (says the forensic scientist) featured pork. Not normal for someone who recently converted to Islam.
So that’s the launch point, or at least one of them. Cross’s wife’s murder still bubbled away in the background, with his two children and grandmother beginning to find strange things going on at home. Someone is watching them, and referencing the murder.
But back to the Goodspeed murder. We soon meet Ed Ramsey (Ryan Eggold) a very wealthy art lover and philanthropist with links to the city’s great and the good. He is also a psychopath serial killer who has a lair. Yes, a lair, where he lures people and – this is his particular, hideous modus operandi – uses plastic surgery to make them look like serial killers he worships. Hence the changed appearance of Emir Goodspead.
He now has a young woman in his tentacles, who he’s intending to remodel as Aileen Wuornos.
Cross and his team – who he’s becoming increasingly estranged from – face… yes, you guessed it… a race against time to save Ramsey’s latest project.
The identity of the killer is revealed very early one, and Eggold enjoys himself hamming up the almost pantomime boogie man. All the usual procedural/serial killer trapping are here, which, depending on your opinion, is a good thing. As I mentioned earlier, it’s thrilling, compelling and, well, fun. There are even nods and winks towards Silence Of The Lambs, Sherlock Holmes and Easy Rawlins.
But the main serial killer storyline doesn’t quite fit with the side strand of the murder of Cross’s wife. In this area, we get much more as Alex Cross the family man, a sensitive, piano-playing, classical-music-loving man. We do get a resolution, but it comes after the Ramsey story and it feels a bit like ‘after the lord mayor’s show’. Plus, any nuance and interest we get from the exploration of race – which wa threatened earlier in the show – is pretty much shoved to one side.
This would have been a cracking two-hour film, but alas – and this is something that’s rife in streaming land – it has been stretched out far longer than it needs to be.
But, with all that being said, Cross is a charismatic lead character and Washington makes for an atmospheric backdrop. And who doesn’t like a serial killer story?
Paul Hirons
