Along came a spider

Language : English / Russian

Year of release : 2001

Run time : 1h43m

Genre : Thriller / Mystery

Cast : Morgan Freeman, Monica Potter, Michael Wincott, Billy Burke, Penelope Ann Miller, Anton Yelchin

The movie is based on the 1993 novel of the same name, by James Patterson, and is the sequel to the 1997 movie “ Kiss the girls”.

The movie opens with a sting operation that doctor / detective Alex Cross is leading, resulting in the death of his partner, who was in the car with the serial k1ller.

8 months later, Alex is beating himself up for her death, refusing to work, and building miniature wooden sail boats.

At a private school, the daughter of an US senator is being kidnapped by her teacher, Soneji, who’s been wearing a disguise for 2 years.

The teacher brings the girl on his boat, and loses the disguise, not wearing any disguise in front of her, meaning maybe he doesn’t plan on her survival.

Alex hears about the kidnapping on tv, and then receives a call from Soneji, who asks him to get involved in the case, as he’s a fan (Alex wrote a few books). He also sends him the girl’s shoe.

Once on board with the team looking for the girl, Jezzie Flannigan’s (the secret service agent who was in charge of her safety) superiors want nothing to do with her, but Alex says her working for 2 years at the school, around Soneji, she knows more about the case than she thinks she does.

When listening to the recording Soneji left for the senator regarding the kidnapping of his daughter, Alex understands Soneji is trying to imitate the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. in 1932.

The little girl is not a damsel in distress, she is very smart, and once she almost got away from Soneji, who k1lled the man who was about to help her.

Speaking of Soneji, we see he has a hidden agenda, as he’s messaging Dimitri, the little girl’s best friend, pretending to be her, trying to get him to get out of the Russian embassy (he is the Russian president’s son) so he could kidnap him.

The movie is not what it seems, as it’s tangled like a spider web, and Soneji is not the only one with interest in the girl.

I personally enjoyed the movie, it’s one of my favorites from 20 years ago.

What I didn’t get was, everybody knows it’s Soneji, they saw him on the cameras, but when he calls Alex and the others, he uses a voice distorting device. Why? Everybody knows it’s him. Although, to his credit, he did wear a disguise as Soneji, as he doesn’t look like that in “real life”.

The movie is atmospheric, most of the time it’s raining, even with lightnings. And it has a twist at the end.

The movie is called “Along came a spider” because Soneji calls himself The Spider, quoting the nursery rhyme line, “Along came a spider and sat down beside her”, from Little Miss Muffet .

The acting was good.

The soundtrack was Ok, at times I liked it ,other times I didn’t.

The visual effects were good. I think they consisted of the car crash scene at the beginning of the movie.

The movie received critics reviews under 42% on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and audience reviews under 6.7 / 53%. IMDB graded it a 6.4.

The movie grossed a little over 105 million dollars at the box office, against a budget of 60 million dollars.

You can find the movie for free on the Ok.Ru platform, in English, with foreign subtitles (including Arabic), and dubbed in Russian.

Rating : Worth a watch !