What's wrong with this 'Alex Cross' trailer?

There is a huge problem with the trailer for Alex Cross, the third attempt at adapting a James Patterson "written" novel to the screen. The first two, Kiss the Girls (1997) and Along Came a Spider (2001), starred Morgan Freeman as the titular character. While the first one was a moderate hit, the second failed.  However, both were savaged by the critics.

The Alex Cross series is basically a cop, a family man, investigating horrible murders, and each book the killer gets more grizzly than the last. It's pulp fiction at best, written by hired writers. Patterson has made it known he doesn't actually write the books, he creates outlines and then hands them over to other writers to actually do the work (which explains why the "quality" goes up and down) of creating a book. For this, Patterson grossed somewhere in the realm of $80 million dollars last year. 

Meanwhile, real writers can barely get an article published let alone a novel.

In the last 12 years, TV has provided us with a lot of procedural shows like the CSI franchise, the NCIS franchise and the Criminal Minds franchise. All of them have done serial killer stories. All have done hundreds of episodes giving us horrible people who do horrible things to other people -mostly women.

So what's wrong with Alex Cross -besides the stupid tag line: Don't Ever Cross Alex Cross? I call it the John Carter Effect. For a 100 years, writers and directors were stealing from Burroughs because they could, mostly due to the fact that bringing John Carter of Mars to the screen required a huge leap in technology. While we have had that technology for the last 20 years, and it's only gotten better. What happened, though, was by the time Disney got around to making John Carter, people who watched it were saying, "hey, we've seen this story before" (and, perhaps burned by Avatar, another film that looked pretty with technology but had its story stolen from Dances with Wolves, people and critics abandoned it). And while the visual effects were impressive, the story failed because it's premise, it's action set pieces and what not, had been cannibalized by writers and directors for 100 years!!

So when I watched this trailer, my initial reaction (beyond the miscasting of Tyler Perry; what Idris Elba was not even considered here?) was Alex Cross resembled an expanded episode of Criminal Minds or CSI (and to some extent as well, Law & Order). 

Again, have we not seen this before?

The reason people go to movies is to see a great film, one where the writing, the acting, the direction and the production design all work in harmony. But when you do films like this, taking a pulp fiction book like these James Patterson "written" novels, and then make it in the most pedestrian sort of way (what's with the poor CGI explosion), without even trying to make it stand-out from the rest is criminal to me.

I ask why should I watch Tyler Perry prance through a tired old TV script that every procedural on the idiot box has done over and over for the last 2 decades? 

And getting back to Elba, did not the studio or the producers even think of approaching him, or did they go with the cheaper Madea actor because he appeals already to a certain demographic? Or if they did get in contact with him, did the Luthor actor realize it was pretty stupid and declined?

The simple moral is this: If you're going to bring a novel series to the screen such as John Carter or the Alex Cross franchise, do it as quickly as possible. TV shows that cover the same ground in the Alex Cross series have been stealing your plots for 20 years. 

And remember: what makes a movie or TV series successful always starts with the script.