ALEX CROSS Official Trailer: Tyler Perry, Matthew Fox

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This post should be written in all caps. Not because I’m excited. Oh, heavens no. But because from twenty seconds in, until its explosive conclusion, the Alex Cross official trailer is shamelessly amped up to 11.

There’s no filter applied on this flood of mainstream macho. A single click on the Play button and you plummet into an abyss of vulgar mainstream appeal.

I suppose I could expect no less from Alex Cross, James Patterson novel hero and iconic big-market bestseller. But in Kiss the Girls, Morgan Freeman portrayed an understated and urbane Cross. This version has about as much as common with that picture as Doctor Who does with Captain Kirk. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the drunk frat dude who barges up to you at a party shirtless and insists that you try punching his six-pack.

For those of you who want to have a swing, here’s the clip. For the rest, who would rather not have their intelligence insulted for two minutes and twenty eight seconds, I feature a list of every pandering gesture to the lowest common denominator of movie marketing.

http://youtu.be/NMVfoEegEuw

Here are just some of the many ways Alex Cross screams for the mainstream’s action-film box office:

* It’s directed by Rob Cohen, director of the rubber-burning, high-explosive, sweaty-and-shirtless mania known as The Fast and the Furious.

* It’s rated PG-13. And it’s a film about a sexual-sadist serial killer. Because those two things go together so well. Ugh.

* It’s got Tyler Perry in it, dropping his usual nuance for a performance that seems like a mannequin filled with nitroglycerin.

* It has a spastic, eyelid-less steroid case of a villain, played by Matthew Fox. Not that serial killers tend to be shrinking dough-boys who smell like Cheeto sweat and Jergens or anything.

* The serial killer is a UFC-fighting special forces soldier. Because that’s a thing.

* The tagline is, I kid you not, “Don’t Ever Cross…Alex Cross.”

I could go on and on, through the car chases and the wife in the sniper rifle scope and the pursuit through a sewer and – my favorite – through lines like, “I will meet his soul at the gates of Hell before I let him take a person that I love from me.” But – as my overarching sentiment about this whole 120-decibel mess tells me –  why bother?