By Curtis P. Ferree
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 22, 1997

'Kiss the Girls' is no Holloween thrill

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures Arizona Daily Wildcat Ashley Judd stars as Dr. Kate McTiernan, a strong-willed woman who survives an encounter with a serial killer and assists in efforts to track him down in "Kiss the Girls."

It seems every Halloween season has a movie that'll get your heart racing. Sadly, this isn't it.

Directed by Gary Fleder ("Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead"), "Kiss the Girls" is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by James Patterson. In it, Alex Cross (Morgan Freeman) is a forensic psychologist who gets involved in a kidnapping case after his niece becomes one of the victims. Upon hearing the news, Cross leaves Washington D.C. and offers his top-notch sleuthing skills to the good ol' boys in the Durham P.D. But the kidnapper, who goes by the name of Casanova, is just too darn clever, even for the amazing powers of deduction of our hero.

They get a break, though, when the beautiful, smart, kick-boxing doctor Kate McTiernan (Ashley Judd) breaks free from the kidnapper's evil clutches. She overcomes being drugged, a long run through unfamiliar woods and a free fall over a giant cliff to safely return and help the police catch the S.O.B. that did this to her.

Then, incredibly, the movie gets even worse.

Viewers who were, upon seeing Morgan Freeman cast as a detective, hoping to see another "Seven," are doomed to be disappointed.

Where thrillers are generally as underwritten as they are overdone, "Seven" had a literary quality that was just what the tired genre needed. "Kiss the Girls," although somewhat similar in subject matter, is lacking everything that made "Seven" good.

The biggest problem with "Kiss the Girls" is the script, perhaps the worst to make it out of Hollywood since "Showgirls." The characters are all merely stock caricatures of every cop-thriller character that has come before.

Cross is a watered down version of Sherlock Holmes, able to do too much with too little. Instead of going by actual clues, Cross seems to pull most of his theories from thin air. After just looking at the pictures of the kidnapper's victims, he is able conclude things that the Durham P.D. and FBI, who have presumably been working on the case for months, have been unable to come up with.

The Durham cops Cross teams up with, Nick Ruskin (Cary Elwes) and Sikes (Alex McArthur) are southern stereotypes with bad accents, forced "down home" quips and an incompetence reminiscent of Barney Fife. Their boss, Chief Hatfield (Brian Cox), is a gruff, by-the-books cop who immediately takes a disliking to Cross and could only be more of a stereotype if he were Irish.

The plot moves forward more by coincidence than anything else. On the crime scene of a murdered victim, Cross runs into his old friend Kyle Craig (Jay O. Sanders), who, conveniently, is an FBI agent investigating the case. Cross isn't even surprised to see him, even though he admits that he thought Craig was in Rochester.

The boyfriend of Cross' niece just happens to be an expert on the wooded area McTiernan is found in, and where, presumably, the kidnapper is holding his victims hostage.

The plot twists that occasion the climax and its resolution are equally contrived, and result in the audience feeling tricked rather than surprised.

The worst part of the script, however, is the corny and melodramatic dialogue which almost turns Cross and McTiernan into cartoons. Everything Cross says is a ludicrous blend of bravado and machismo that, when taken with the leather jacket he wears, makes us think that at any moment the soundtrack might have Isaac Hayes break into "Shaft."

McTiernan gets the worst of the dialogue, however, which reduces her to a token "strong-yet-sensitive" heroine who seems to react to everything with only the most pat of emotional responses.

Even the thrills, which could have been the one redeeming aspect of this movie, are minimal. What little suspense there is lies more in wondering how the director will tie up his loose ends, rather than from anything inherent in the story. The few moments when the audience might jump are due to the volume of the stereo sound as opposed to anything that is happening on screen.

So if you're looking for something to get your blood going this Halloween season, save your money: stay at home, eat chocolate, rent "The Shining."