The many faces of Alex Cross: Aldis Hodge follows in Morgan Freeman and Tyler Perry’s footsteps

There is something in the enduring power of a character when they are on to the third screen version of them.

This week, another iteration of Alex Cross comes out in the form of Cross, an eight-episode streaming series starring Aldis Hodge as the police detective and psychologist who first appeared in James Patterson’s 1993 novel, Along Came a Spider.

It’s a character we’ve seen on screen before, most memorably with Morgan Freeman in the films Kiss the Girls (1997) and Along Came a Spider (2001). Tyler Perry also had a crack in the 2012 effort, Alex Cross, but it bombed badly enough that a planned sequel, Double Cross, was promptly guillotined.

Cross feels fresher and more in conversation with the real world than the previous screen versions. The show is engaged with debates around policing in America and all the controversies that go along with it.

In an early episode, Alex Cross nearly comes to blows with a dinner party guest who tells challenges him on how a black man could be part of the police force, that he, the guest, would feel as if he was a traitor to his family.

It’s a crunchy subject and one without an easy answer, which Cross does not attempt to give. Nor does it say it has the answers about the extent to which Cross’s police chief exploits his profile and blackness to “manage” community outrage, but doesn’t listen to him when he says that a dead activist did not die of an overdose but was murdered, and no, not because of gangs.

Patterson, who has penned 32 Alex Cross novels in the past three decades, told The Hollywood Reporter that the series is more contemporary. He even hinted that the character of his books is “for a little different audience for the most part”.

Like with many long-running best-selling book series, especially in crime dramas, the Alex Cross novels are, to an extent, airport books. They’re pulpy and readable, and follows a format in building crime stories that one preternaturally smart detective can solve.

Alex Cross is a cerebral detective, using his little grey cells to one-up the bad guys, not that he’s not prone to some physical heroics too. But he is, in some ways, an archetype onto which a reader can project what they want, even themselves.

So, perhaps it’s not that surprising that when Patterson first published Along Came a Spider and it became a hit, Hollywood came calling and the first offer he got for the screen rights was in the seven figures.

“They said, ‘We just want one change, we want Alex to be a white guy’, and I said, ‘F**k you’. It was painful, but I did it,” Patterson recalled to THR.

He didn’t have to wait too long. Paramount made Kiss the Girls, adapted from Patterson’s second novel, in 1997, with Freeman in the role and a supporting cast which included Ashley Judd, Cary Elves, Tony Goldwyn and Brian Cox.

The story centred on a spate of missing women, including Alex Cross’s niece, and bicoastal abductors who were sharing their handiwork with each other. It made decent coin but was critically derided.

A sequel followed in 2001, this time adapting Patterson’s debut Cross novel, co-starring Monica Potter, Dylan Baker and Michael Wincott. It would be the last time Freeman played the role.

Those movies are serviceable thrillers in an era full of the same, and were distinctive only in that Freeman, hot off The Shawshank Redemption and Seven, was a massive star.

In a time before the power of “the IP brand”, it remains unsettled whether they were, first and foremost, Alex Cross movies or Morgan Freeman movies.

The Tyler Perry movie is a largely forgotten affair, other than that Idris Elba had been attached at one point.

The Cross series has more specificity to it. It exists in a more fleshed-out world in which his family, his colleagues and his professional challenges are more vivid than the actual case (rich, bleached blond serial killer with a penchant for other serial killers, nothing to write home about).

Hodge is a great actor with a long list of credits including Underground, City on a Hill and Leverage, but he doesn’t have the Freeman-level profile which may overwhelm the character.

This time, the character is the star, ably supported by a nuanced universe that is interested in more than just the one-off thrills of chasing a baddie.

It’s an Alex Cross for the 21st century.

Cross is streaming on Prime, Kiss the Girls is on Netflix and Stan, Along Came a Spider is on Stan and SBS on Demand, Alex Cross is on Stan