Along Came A Spider

ALONG CAME A SPIDER

Rating: C+

In the opening scene, police detective Morgan Freeman's female partner is engaged in an undercover op to ensnare a serial sex offender. As he drives her in his hot red convertible, he becomes suspicious (the microphone earring will do it every time) and the two begin to struggle. She pulls out her gun and plugs him, and the car plunges over a cliff accompanied by some very poor digital compositing. I think we're supposed to feel sorry for Freeman and his partner, but I didn't. First of all, anyone stupid enough to shoot the driver of the car she's riding in deserves to be removed from the gene pool. Second, the guy she was trying to arrest didn't seem all that bad. Sure, he was a sex maniac, but at least he seemed like a nice sex maniac.

As we cut to sometime later, we find Freeman still battling with guilt over the opening scene. Frankly, his feelings are hard to understand, since the digital compositing wasn't his fault. Fortunately, psycho-badguy Michael Wincott comes to the rescue by involving Freeman in the kidnapping of a senator's daughter. (If Denis Leary and Willem Dafoe ever had a kid together, he'd grow up to look and sound like Michael Wincott.) And if you can understand the explanation for why Wincott goes out of his way to drag Freeman into this, you were paying more attention than I was, because it makes no sense whatsoever as far as I can see.

Which is the major problem with this film. The whole movie has the feel of being assembled out of bits and pieces which don't quite fit together. The more you think about the plot, the more the holes become evident, and some of them are big enough to sail an oil tanker through. For example, Wincott's entire motive for the kidnapping, both why he did it and why he chose that particular victim, is on ground shakier than Los Angeles during its annual earthquake. Director Lee Tamahori continually asks us to accept one far-fetched notion after another, as if he has little respect for our intelligence. Helping matters are some unexpected twists and turns, and Monica Potter (Sandra Bullock's identical twin, with bleached-blonde hair) who's on hand to look pretty as Freeman's unwanted tag-along partner, but leaving the theater you won't be proclaiming, "Now that was a good script!" At least I hope not.

Time for some nitpicking:

1. If a car is backing straight away from you at high speed, and you're in a standing position, you're not going to be able to see its tires, much less shoot one out.

2. In these days of caller ID and *69, you'd think filmmakers would finally realize that the old scene of "keep the kidnapper on the phone so we can complete the trace" is hopelessly outdated (nowadays, part of the signal sent simultaneously with the voice identifies the call's origin immediately).

3. Crack police detective Freeman is momentarily stumped when he encounters a Windows computer which requires a login password. Of course he happens to guess the password correctly on the first attempt (don't they always), but that's not even the problem. You'd think someone involved in police work would know you can defeat the password requirement simply by rebooting the computer. Then again, if you can guess the password on your very first try, maybe you don't need to know that.

Okay, I'm done. But wasn't that fun?