Alex Cross (2012)

The villain in this third movie based on the James Patterson series of Alex Cross books starts off as a skilled cage fighter, spends some time as a nasty home-invading torturer of women, is revealed to be a meticulous drawer of charcoal crime scene pictures, an accomplished portrait artist and a proficient in composing abstracts, morphs for the middle stretch of the film into a sniper assassin, then turns out to be a technical wizard who can manipulate the electrics of a city train, and on and on and on it goes, with Tyler Perry - not the first two movies' Morgan Freeman - playing the title character who uses clichėd psychology to solve the mess of a mystery and catch the utrerly implausible chameleon crim.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Purge: Anarchy (2014)

This is like a grown-up, grubby, gloss-free version of the Hunger Games but with no-one famous in it, and no budget, and not much reason to care who out of its character ensemble will survive, so it is surprising to read that this second movie in the series is considered a great improvement upon the first movie which must have been an especially cliche-riddled, predictable sci-fi horror, I presume also centred around an annual 12-hour event, The Purge, that invites people to participate in a population-culling crime spree.

★★☆☆☆

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