Cross wants so badly to cash in on the current superhero film craze that it fatally neglects all of the elements needed to make a movie: writing, acting, editing, and direction. Perhaps the film’s failings can be attributed to Patrick Durham who pulls triple duty as the film’s writer, director, and as an actor, but does none of them particularly well. He managed to take a cast littered with recognizable faces, and even some really talented actors, and churn out a film devoid of humor, adrenaline, or wit. Cross is quite simply a trainwreck so awful that it’s too bad to be funny and so poorly constructed that it can’t even be used as a cautionary tale. Cross should be avoided by anyone who has an appreciation for action, comedy, or film as a medium of expression because it has nothing to say.
L.A. has a team of heroes headed by Callan (Brian Austin Green), a man protected by a green force field generated by a Celtic cross his father gave him just before dying, and rounded out by Backfire (Jake Busey), Lucia (Lori Heuring), War (Durham), Riot (Tim Abell), Shark (Jonathan Sachar), Ranger (Andre Gordon), an assassin on sabbatical, assassin-on-sabbatical Saint (Ned Liebl), and other characters with equally painful and corny names. They wage a daily war against crime boss Erlik (Michael Clarke Duncan), who has his men going about the city collecting blood from women of four different bloodlines to complete an ancient staff for Gunnar (Vinnie Jones) aka “the Viking”. As Erlik inches closer to completing his task and women begin disappearing, Cross and his troops catch on and begin looking for answers. Acting as a poorly written buffer to encapsulate the story, Tom Sizemore acts as a laughable imitation of a comic book detective dead set on chasing after the vigilantes as damage control while simultaneously endorsing their work as an ultimate good.
If there’s a cliché to be had in the superhero genre, Cross has it. The protagonist orphaned by the murder of parents? Got it. Beautiful girlfriend to act as a damsel in distress? Yep. The (attempted) smart aleck comic relief? Present. Scenes designed to show just how ruthless and formulaic its villain is? Again, yes. Patrick Durham didn’t have a single original idea when he put cross together, yet somehow he managed to rope in a cast whose faces on a DVD cover will go a long way towards getting it more rentals and purchases than it ever deserved. While I understand Jake Busey or Vinnie Jones showing up here, Michael Clarke Duncan can certainly do better and I think it’s fair to say he has yet to do worse than Cross.
Performances are abysmally bad across the board, but Jones, Robert Carradine, and Abell lead as the bringers of the awful. While Jones’s roles always come with a flair for the comical, hear it’s just empty and he has no comedy to work with. He’s a dry bland villain with no character beyond a poor attempt at infusing him with menace that just doesn’t take. Abell is a one-note player who’s stiff and wooden, and not just because he’s wrapped up in body armor and a baseball cap leaving nothing but three quarters of his face visible. The worst of the lot is Carradine who should have been cut from the film after he delivered the performance he did here. What Carradine did here isn’t acting; there isn’t a single thing resembling dramatic or comedic delivery in his lines, instead it resembles something closer to yelling with absolutely no nuance or emotion.
Adding to the unbelievable nature of how bad this film managed to be, beyond getting Michael Clarke Duncan and Vinnie Jones, Durham wrangled cameos for Danny Trejo, Karate Kid's William Zabka, and former pop-singer Samantha Mumba.
Cross is a lesson of everything that shouldn’t be done in a superhero film, but it’s packaged in a form that’s too miserable to be watched. You won’t learn from this, you’ll just regret watching it whether or not you finish it.
DVD Bonus Features
An alternate ending, which fails to improve upon the film’s anti-climactic finale, deleted scenes, a terribly convoluted rough draft of an opening animatic, and an audio commentary by Durham comprise the film’s mercifully short extras.
"Cross" is on sale May 31, 2011 and is rated R. Action. Directed by Patrick Durham. Written by Patrick Durham, Jonathan Sachar, Tanner Wiley. Starring Brian Austin Green, Michael Clarke Duncan, Tim Abell, Tom Sizemore, Vinnie Jones, Patrick Durham, Jake Busey, Lori Heuring.
