I am a Jack Reacher fan. Having read all seventeen novels in Lee Child’s series, I never tire of Reacher’s unwavering, moralistic thirst for justice. Six-feet-five with hands “like two frozen chickens”, ex-military-police, drifter with no ties to anyone or anything except for his folding toothbrush, the character always fights for what he believes is right before moving on without a trace. “You don’t find this guy unless he wants to be found.”
When Tom Cruise was announced to play Reacher in this adaptation, understandably, fans were sceptical. In fact, a lot were outraged that 5ft 7in Cruise would dare touch their beloved hero. I had a little more faith. Cruise has a great history of playing action heroes in spite of his stature, the most obvious being in Mission: Impossible. He is an actor who can make a bad film watchable purely from his performance. Unfortunately, this is somewhat true of Jack Reacher.
The film opens with a gunman sniping and killing five civilians with six bullets at a busy plaza. He leaves a string of undeniable evidence that leads the police to make this an open and shut case: it was James Barr, ex-military sniper. Case closed, only the assassin we saw is not the man they have in custody. Barr rightly denies the charge and instead writes “Get Jack Reacher” on the paper provided for his full confession. Enter Cruise.
Barr has been beaten into a coma in prison so it’s left to Reacher and defence lawyer Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike) to figure out why he asked for Reacher and who framed him. From here, we are fed an exposition-heavy string of dialogue to get from A to B to C as Reacher starts to put pieces of the puzzle together. It was a strange choice of screenwriter/director Christopher McQuarrie’s to show the shooter’s face in the opening scene (unlike the book). This somewhat weakens the impact of Reacher’s detective skills as the audience is already a step ahead.
This is not the only oddity about Jack Reacher: there are plenty of supposedly audience-pleasing comic touches. Some of these admittedly come off well such as a slick end to the film’s surprisingly dull car chase where Reacher blends into a crowd of people leaving the police bewildered. However, one fight scene in a bathroom between Reacher and two thugs is nothing more than slapstick despite its violent portrayal. There is a constant feeling of the pieces not quite fitting together and there are some definite pacing issues.
A welcome cameo from old pro Robert Duvall exposes the weakness of other supporting players but this does in turn lend itself to highlight Cruise as the power-house Reacher should be. All attributes of Reacher’s character (except height, of course) are given screen time: his wit, his intelligence, his morals and his brute strength. This is Jack Reacher, albeit a Hollywoodised version of him.
The best parts of this film are the parts unchanged from the book: the story, the character of Reacher and the parts of his dialogue which have survived. McQuarrie and Cruise (producer here too) have attempted to weave this into a 12A crowd-pleaser and will probably succeed. For all its shortcomings, it was (sometimes unintentionally) fun but anything more than that and I would have to disagree. At least the world now knows the name Jack Reacher and I will go and see the inevitable sequel; that is on the assumption that it follows the line of the books and Reacher is the only returning player.
RATING: See it cheap [My rating system: See it / See it cheap / Skip it]