Cruise Month - Mini Review: Jack Reacher

In this movie, Cruise obsesses over a woman whilst trying to get a job done. “What, again?” you might ask and yes, this is a well to common trait of Tom Cruise movies. Let’s have a look where plays a cop that’s supposed to be considerably taller than him.

Based on the 2005 novel ‘One Shot’ written as a part of a series by Lee Child, Jack Reacher enjoyed moderate success earning $218m on a $60m budget. Not exactly the usual flare of a Cruise movie. But then it says it all that there was a promotional competition for the movie on the channel Dave.

Paramount and Cruise/Wagner productions acquired the rights to Child’s novels in 2005 (and it only took them 2013 to release the product) after the failure of several other attempts at an adaptation. Cruise’s casting in the role was met with some criticism given the stature of Jack Reacher in the book.

So, let’s dig in

So, can we count the clichés:

Tom Cruise has a love interest that prominently features: check

Tom Cruise is on the run from the law for at least a portion of the movie: check 

Tom Cruise is exceptional at what he does: check 

Tom Cruise starts off as a bit of an *sshole: check again

Yup, those are the 4 big clichés of a Tom Cruise movie. Mission Impossible features 2, 2, 3, 2 of those respectively, Edge of Tomorrow also managed 3. So what’s the plot?

When 5 seemingly random people are murdered, all evidence points towards James Barr (Joseph Sikora) being the one responsible. When faced with a choice by District Attorney Alex Rodin (Richard Jenkins) and Detective Emerson (David Oylowo) to write a confession or face a trial and potentially the death penalty he writes a single note: “Get Jack Reacher”

Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) arrives literally in the next scene. He’s a ghost, blending into the shadows and only being found when he wants to be. He enters with the intent of killing James, who he’d made a promise too after an incident in the military. He bumps into Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike), Barr’s Defence Attorney who asks him to look at Barr objectively. He agrees to so long as she questions the victim’s families

Reacher checks out the evidence and is soon set upon by gang members, alerting him that something else might be going on. When hearing that one of the victims owned a construction business which she was refusing to sell, Reacher realises that Barr is innocent and there’s a wider conspiracy at large which he will stop at nothing to stop.

This is a classic example of a movie that takes itself way way way too seriously.  There isn’t humour in the entire movie. I’m not saying that humour is absolutely necessary in an action movie (hell, my favourite movie is The Dark Knight, although you could argue even the Dark Knight had more humour than this) but when you lack the less serious moments, the makes the goofier elements from the climax of the film seem somewhat odd.

In the climax of the movie we have things like a sniper with only one good eye taking near perfect shots, driving backwards down a hill whilst lying down. A big case of main character shields and Cruise throws away his advantage to engage in a fist fight.

So… Yeah, this movie is too serious and it treads down a lot of roads that all Tom Cruise movies seem to do. But the story is decent. I actually quite liked the main story, and didn’t think casting Cruise as the lead served any ill favours. Cruise does most of his own stunts, so his fighting (much improved for the awful-looking wire-work from Mission Impossible 2) actually looks pretty impressive.

Helen Rodin may be the hostage in the climax, but she serves a decent purpose into driving some humanity into the otherwise distant Jack Reacher, even if she does have her failings. Having an overprotective father was a nice touch, although I don’t know about her ‘throwing her career away’ if she loses siding with a guilty party. Surely lawyers sometimes have to represent guilty clients.

There really are no other major supporting characters, so let’s get onto the villains, and we see fairly clearly early on that they’re a threat, but they leave with a lot of unanswered questions. The leader is called Zec, meaning prisoner, his last names means Human. We could’ve done with hearing more about his origins. As for the other villains, they’re completely uninteresting. That counts double for the muscular guy who really does nothing in the entire film.

Then we have Cash, I mentioned him being a guy who’s blind in one eye and who can shoot straight. He is a guy who just sorta shows up to help as the climax nears. This is lazy! Don’t bring in a character for the climax, introduce him in some respect!

As it is, it’s a strong enough movie, but not one I’d enjoy.

Rating 45/100

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Images used in this review are from Jack Reacher and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.