In yet another curious casting choice, venerable German director Werner Herzog plays a villain known only as “The Zec,” an underutilized and underwritten role that nonetheless makes nice use of Herzog’s frightening accent. It’s Cruise at his most formidable since Collateral.
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When a gang of bar toughs start a fight with Reacher outside a saloon, the outcome is never in question, not just because the movie is named after him, so we know Reacher will be okay (he is), but because Cruise lends Reacher a wary intensity that tells us he will hunt down every last one of these punks if he has to (he does). It’s incongruous, but Cruise sells Reacher’s steely resolve and ruthless agitation: He is not a man to be trifled with, and he does things for his own reasons, which may or may not include justice. In what should be a ridiculous scene – Cruise taunting a goon over the phone by threatening to kill him and drink his blood from a boot – Cruise somehow makes it just the right amount of funny while making us believe that he would, in fact, kill that man and drink his blood from a boot. Cruise doesn’t much resemble the Reacher of Child’s novels, but he (inexplicably – this is still Tom Cruise) does sell the underlying menace and moral ambivalence of Reacher well. Written and adapted for the screen by Christopher McQuarrie, an Academy Award winner for his screenplay to the similarly minded The Usual Suspects, plays a lot of those same notes of sleazy criminal excess here, and it’s in those moments that Jack Reacher shines. There’s plenty of gunfire and car chases throughout, but there’s also crime noir fixtures like the fallen woman, the flunky thugs who get in over their heads, and the reluctant anti-hero just trying to settle old debts. Though promoted as an action movie, Jack Reacher has more in common with Mickey Spillane than Michael Bay.
As you might expect, Barr’s guilt isn’t as clear as it first seems, and Reacher soon finds himself unraveling a conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of dangerous men with secrets worth killing for.
Reacher, taciturn but lured in by an old promise to Barr, proceeds on his own investigation into Barr’s apparent open-and-shut case. Reacher is hired by Barr’s attorney, Helen (Rosamund Pike, Wrath of the Titans), who happens to be Rodin’s daughter and is far more skeptical of Barr’s guilt than her disapproving father.
Not unlike the A-Team, if you can find him, and no one else can help, you might be able to hire Jack Reacher. According to all databases, the man is a ghost, baffling District Attorney Rodin (Richard Jenkins, The Cabin in the Woods) and lead investigator Emerson (David Oyelowo, Lincoln)… until the man himself walks in the door.
In this adaptation of the novel One Shot, Cruise’s Reacher is living off the grid after a long career as Military Police.
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The rest of the movie occasionally lives up to this strongly declarative opening, though it more often wallows in the usual business of Hollywood thrillers. Tom Cruise stars as Reacher, the hero of a series of novels by Lee Child. Instead of a confession, he issues a three-word plea: GET JACK REACHER. Within hours of the incident, investigators have the suspect, James Barr, a disgraced Army sniper, in custody and a raft of evidence pointing to him as the killer. Even without factoring in current events, the scene is brutal, breathtaking and sets up what’s at play with stunning efficiency. Jack Reacher opens in startling fashion, as a sniper calmly and methodically sets up his rifle on the upper floors of a Pittsburgh parking garage and, taking all the time in the world, guns down five random pedestrians walking along the river on a warm spring day.