I must be slipping. I had assumed that mountain climbing thrillers are the only films left that would resort to opening with a person dangling from a cliff (or in this case, a dam), with the hero only inches away, yet unable to save her. Not only does Along Came A Spider, which is decidedly not a mountain climbing movie, begin this way, but it also follows it up with the obligatory "Alex, it's been 8 months, when are you going to forgive yourself?" scene.

My hopes for this film began to fall.

After the opening, which seems more appropriate for a Stallone or Schwarzenegger film, we settle in for the real plot. We find ourselves at a boarding school for the sort of kids that have secret service agents surrounding them -- that is to say, they are the offspring of the rich, powerful and political. Since the opening scene was such a cliché, it seems only fitting that we'd be given another one right away. This takes the form of technology invented for the film that is given just enough attention to alert the audience that it will become a critical plot point later on. In this case, we see the kids chatting with each other through the use of encoded messages in GIF pictures.

Moving right along, the beloved teacher, Mr. Soneji (Michael Wincott), turns out to be anything but when he kidnaps a senator's daughter and viciously strangles a female faculty member. Later on in the investigation it's implied that there must some connection between Soneji and the dead woman because strangulation is an act of passion. After this declaration, the matter is never brought up again. This sets a trend for the film of giving us insightful deductions that serve no other point than to tell us how brilliant our hero is.

Directly after the kidnapping, Soneji calls up Dr. Alex Cross (Morgan Freeman), a Washington detective and psychologist famous for several books he's written about criminal profiling. It seems that Soneji considers the kidnapping a game and he wants Cross to play.

Cross teams up with Agent Jezzie (Monica Potter), who was the secret service agent assigned to the kidnapped girl. They join the investigation at the school, where we learn the importance of the aforementioned invented technology and we are hit full in the face with lazy script writing. Rather than allow Cross any real investigative screentime, he stumbles upon an impossible internet link that feeds him live video from the kidnapper's home. This little webcam is so advanced that it offers Cross film-quality resolution of the label of a prescription bottle from across the room.

Naturally, this clue and invitation to his home is something the kidnapper intended Cross to find. You see, his motive for the crime is not money or revenge or anything of the like. Instead, Soneji is a fan of the Lindbergh kidnapping and he intends to top it. While Cross and company are poking around his home, Soneji has the girl safely stashed away on his boat. The game is afoot.

By this point, the film is precariously in danger of tumbling into the absurd. But apparently that wasn't good enough for the writers, so they give it some healthy pushes. Cross continues to make intuitive leaps that seem possible only for someone who has read ahead in the script and the more we learn about Soneji, the more implausible his motives seem. When the ransom demand finally comes, there is simply no sense of urgency left. As if realizing this, the film inserts a ransom drop off ripped right out of Die Hard With a Vengeance, with Cross racing around Washington trying to answer the pay phones on time.

Along Came A Spider is the follow-up film to Kiss The Girls. The previous effort was known for its surprise ending, so I guess it was expected that Spider have a twist as well. The one thing I expect of twist endings, however, is that they must play fair and not contradict everything that has come before. I imagine the filmmakers felt pressure to make this a bigger and better twist than Kiss The Girls. They succeed in the bigger part, but unfortunately their effort seems contrived and far too Hollywood -- then again, I suppose that's fitting. The ending isn't too difficult to guess, but that's simply because of an understanding of Hollywood cliché rather than any logic or clues left in the film. Quite simply, the ending is a blatant cheat.