Title: Jack Reacher
Starring: Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, David Oyelowo, Werner Herzog, Robert Duvall.
Director/Writer: Christopher McQuarrie
Release: December 21, 2012
Budget: $60,000,000
Box Office: $183,473,482 (so far!)
In movies, it’s not unusual for an actor to be bigger than the character they’re playing, whether it be Arnie in The Terminator, Conan et al, Al Pacino in Scent Of A Woman, or the entire career of Steven Seagal. These actors do a certain thing well, they do it often, and they find success with audiences. It’s something that Tom Cruise has been guilty of of late. For a long time, he’s relied on combining his three acting faces – scowling, smiling, staring – to create performances that while hardly engrossing, get the job done and but end up burying very interesting characters under the fact that it’s Tom f-ing Cruise on the screen.
Thank goodness, then, for Jack Reacher, a character that outshines Cruise at his most Cruise-like. Not just in stature – in the novels upon which this movie is based, Jack is six-foot-five and 250 pounds, which is about two and a half Tom Cruises – but in filmic presence.
Thrust into a snappily directed modern twist on 90s thrillers and mysteries, Reacher is a protagonist out of time; avoiding banks, houses and jobs, even his beloved Army until he and his old-fashioned but still very effective ways are called in to rescue a seemingly guilty murderer from a seemingly open-and-shut case, which director Chris McQuarrie sets up in a gripping first five minutes that revels in silence before gunshots kick off a full CSI-style montage of technological evidence gathering.
It’s an intriguing set-up, and by the time this and some macho posturing from David Oyelowo’s icy detective are out of the way, Reacher feels like a breath of fresh air purely because he uses a pad and pencil, doesn’t count on computers for information and (in one hilarious scene) would rather use a payphone than an iPhone. McQuarrie mounts intrigue on his intrigue early, revealing Jack’s connection and feelings toward the suspect to be the mirror opposite of what you would want the person trying to save you to be feeling. But quickly it’s established that this is just another thing the character doesn’t care about. Through stacked flashbacks and worthy back-and-forths with Rosamund Pike’s spunky lawyer and the District Attorney’s (Richard Jenkins, phoning it in) daughter, we’re quickly told that the facts, the details and the truth are all that matter to Jack Reacher.
So well written and constructed is our hero that Cruise’s deadpan, sometimes bland, delivery can’t hinder the draw of the character and when he does occasionally get the performance right, as in the climactic phonecall scene, the film really flies. It also helps that Tom Cruise, like Reacher, kicks ass at kicking ass.
Because for all it’s neat visual touches, messages about true freedom and twisty corruption-filled plot, there’s no doubt that this is the core element of the film; Tom Cruise fighting. A series of short, brutal, gimmicky scraps and a pacy if by-the-numbers car chase provide plenty of thrills, before Robert Duvall, in an important cameo, joins in on a bullet-riddled climax that has cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s camera ricocheting like the bullets themselves, then deftly switches to a rain-soaked one-on-one between Reacher and remorseless, relentless arch-henchman Charlie (Jai Courtney, soon to be seen as Bruce Willis Juniour in the upcoming A Good Day To Die Hard) and pulls another switcheroo in tone with Reacher’s treatment of the film’s Big Bad, “The Zec”, essayed here with hoarse, ghostly style by legendary director Werner Herzog. It’s economical, visually engaging and delivers bucketloads of audience satisfaction.
Unfortunately, a lot of this good work is scuppered by some wild shifts in tone and a few “huh?” moments in terms of character development that throw both the hero and his heroics off their stride at some fairly important times. For every welcome twist on the genre, there’s a glaringly derivative moment; On the one hand, you’re likely to breathe a sigh of relief at Cruise and Pike’s characters not falling in love during the investigation, only shortly after gasping in disbelief that during a five-against-one (or three-against-one in Reacher-ese) scrap intended to rub out Reacher, his attackers see fit to just let him walk out in the street and take up an advantageous position. And when the gormless teen behind this early set-up (Alexia Fast) invites him on a date a little later on, much head-scratching ensues. While this scene is a necessary attempt to inject depth into a one-dimensional character and fluff up a major plot thread, it feels clunky and the film would be better off without it.
But the biggest mis-step of all comes during the climax. Yes it’s cool to see someone mount an assault on a criminal compound using the car’s reversing camera, but it’s a lot less cool when that hero has been built up as a gritty, tech-shy warrior who waxes lyrical about being trapped by the very things he just used to win the day. It smacks of something that wasn’t given much thought beyond its presence as a cool stunt, and does a lot of damage to what McQuarrie and co. achieve in the preceding two acts.
Jack Reacher is a lot of fun, and a lot funnier than trailers would have us believe, and in Reacher himself, both the filmmakers and Cruise have a character that audiences could, and probably will, want to keep coming back to, particularly in these technology heavy times. Hopefully when the inevitable next instalment of the Jack Reacher series cruises (couldn’t help it) onto our screens, it will stay a little truer to the nature of the protagonist and deliver the five-star experience it’s capable of.
Rating: 7/10
