"Alex Cross" reviews: What the critics are saying

You can't get much worse than a nine percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That's the current tally on the film review aggregator site for "Alex Cross," the new mystery/suspense thriller starring Tyler Perry, Matthew Fox and Ed Burns.

Critics have given director Rob Cohen's ("The Fast and the Furious") latest work pretty brutal reviews. Take this one from William Bibbiani of Crave Online, for example: "Could very well be the funniest film of the year. It's so, so bad, that I totally recommend you see it."

Although funnyman Perry stars in the flick, based on a series of popular mysteries, it's not intended to be a comedy. Perry steps out of his comic comfort-zone and steps in to the role of Alex Cross, a homicide detective and psychologist; Burns plays his detective-partner, Tommy Kane. Trouble brews when they encounter Picasso (Fox), a serial killer specializing in torture and pain. Apparently, many movie critics thought "Alex Cross" was a painful endeavor to watch. Here's what some of them had to say:

Rafer Guzman of Newsday: "It feels almost cruel to laugh at such a blindly stumbling, dunderheaded action-thriller, but you won't be able to help it."

Mick LaSalle of San Francisco Chronicle: "'Alex Cross' is a good example of what a seriously talented director can do with a heaping pile of garbage."

Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe: "If I hadn't had to stay awake, I would have slept though the whole thing. At home."

Glenn Kenny of MSN Movies: "Somebody got it wrong. A lot of people got it wrong. And the result is one of the most ridiculous, laughable and dim-bulbed serial killer thrillers in recent memory or ever. Seriously, people, this movie is to 'Silence of the Lambs' as 'I Am Number Four' is to 'E.T.'"

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times: "The direction by Rob Cohen is so careless that the film's climax is set up by a car crash that, if I am not mistaken, is completely coincidental."

Claudia Puig of USA Today: "Tyler Perry should not give up his day job. At least not until he chooses better dramatic vehicles for branching out."

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times: "A grim, dispiritingly stupid waste of time, energy, money and talent, directed by Rob Cohen, this is the first installment in what one of its producers warned Entertainment Weekly would be 'the new Tyler Perry franchise, a worldwide one.'"