Cross

Tortured, brilliant hero with an almost supernatural ability to navigate a mental maze of clues and come out the other side with the answer? Check, check, and check. What sets Cross apart, though, is that Watson and his writers treat those tropes as a point of departure rather than home base.

Opting for a new mystery welcomes fans and newbies alike to the world of Alex Cross in a successful adaptation that's left us feeling anything but cro… disappointed.

Cross is a solid crime thriller made very watchable by Hodge’s performance as the title character.

“Cross” is largely captivating, but there are a couple of flubs. .... Still, with Hodge at the center and Watkins at the helm, “Cross” is a crime drama boasting several astonishing curveballs.

Alex Cross joins Prime Video’s growing legion of literary badasses in what’s easily the strongest and most faithful adaptation of James Patterson’s bestselling detective series to date.

Created by Ben Watkins, the series is solidly made and stylistically straightforward but does suffer a bit from its split personality. .... But above all, Hodge and Mustafa are charismatic performers with an easy rapport that begs for a reteaming.

For those looking for another action-crime series to stream while waiting for new seasons of Reacher and The Night Agent, Cross will surely do the trick.

Elements of Amazon Prime Video’s “Cross” make it stand out, but those positive attributes often get canceled out by predictable, unseemly scenes of violence against women.

Prime’s eight-episode thriller from creator Ben Winter takes a creepy premise and makes it violent and watchable, even if the plot does doughnuts around logic. What saves it is that Hodge and Winters allow novelist James Patterson’s well-known character to be more of an anguished soul than the actors who previously portrayed him.

Cross frequently crosses the line beyond improbable to incredibly insane, with a series of escalating climaxes that feel like a game of whack-the-perv. On the other hand, it's never boring. [18 Nov - 8 Dec 2024, p.4]

Undone by the same sort of distension that plagues so many modern television offerings, not to mention a contrived plot that’s as ridiculous as its attempts to straddle the line between celebrating and critiquing cops.

Though Hodge’s grounded center singlehandedly keeps the drama watchable throughout, the material around him is exploitative, frustratingly trashy and absolutely destined to be a hit.

Cross’ attempt to both create and critique a TV police procedural that offers a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase between killer and cop comes up short. But that’s not for lack of ambition.

Ultimately, the premise is too limited to fill an eight-episode series, and I couldn’t watch the scenes featuring the killer and his victim. They are too frequent. Too miserable.

This version of "Cross," however, seems like all the worst stereotypes about the genre mashed up into a slow, overly long season of television.

Cross knows what type of show it wants to be, but it can't commit to going all the way.

Hodge, usually a magnetic performer, settles on a glaring, unmediated intensity. The A plot, in which Cross investigates the murder of a defund-the-police activist, blossoms into a richly nonsensical “Silence of the Lambs”-style fantasia. Common sense is left far behind, in matters large and small.

The result is a frustrating show that swings between compelling drama and hackneyed melodrama – alas, more often the latter.

Despite only being eight episodes, the season still feels overlong. The serial killer storyline in particular is dragged out beyond all reason, and even at times when it appears to be coming to a head, a new spanner will be thrown into the works to explain why the renowned detective Cross can't capture the most obvious villain in TV history.