Z/Web

I’d just finished the book when I heard the movie was coming out; unusual timing. Unfortunately, though I really wanted to like the film, I can’t recommend it. It has a lot of good things — the cast, though unknown, is decent, and it’s well-done from a technical perspective. Unfortunately all the book’s profundity is lost and all that’s left is a mere revenge story, a meaningless and extremely ugly story of violence and hate. In the book there were aspects of the story that revealed things about Hannibal’s character; in the movie those are forgotten as the story’s reduced to mere action plot points.

Author: James Patterson

This is supposed to be the story of detective-psychologist Alex Cross’s most dangerous opponent, the man who killed his wife. Unfortunately I found the antagonist to be weakly done; he wasn’t that scary (he’s merely an efficient mob hitman), and Patterson ineptly plays with the time-line of events making everything quite confusing (like one day his wife is killed and suddenly it’s ten years later). Patterson’s generally a poor writer (so much so that I’ve started avoiding his books), but in this one he has a few moments of decency. A couple times I was shocked to almost hear genuine insight. Unfortunately, all is ruined by the book’s dismal finale, which is competely anticlimatic, boring, and unsatisfying. The book should be cut in half as it’s way too long for the material, with lots of pointless meandering (like whole storylines of his counseling patients that are just dropped with no resolution). The whole thing felt like so much melodrama, overhyped and overdone. Note: I listened to the unabridged audiobook, so some of this could have been the presentation, which was definitely over-the-top, but then again, it’s probably just the poor writing.