Jack Reacher - Movie Review

Starring Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, Robert Duvall, Werner Herzog, David Oyelowo, Jai Courtney and Michael Raymond-James.
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie.

★★★

I have not read the Jack Reacher books, and my understanding is that Tom Cruise is physically nothing like what Lee Child's described.  Going solely off what I saw on the screen, it worked.  It might have worked better with a bigger, more menacing-looking guy, but Cruise has done enough action flicks that I could buy him in the role.

Reacher is an ex-MP, very good at what he does. When a fellow veteran is accusing of snipering five people, he asks for Reacher. They are not friends. Reacher doesn't like the guy, but Reacher has investigative skills that match his combat skills.

I liked that this was a mystery, that there were layers to peel back.

I also see why the premiere was cancelled. The opening scene is a sniper, and one of his victims is a young woman carrying a child. In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, that image takes on a new dimension. Bad timing by the movie, but this is the story they chose to tell.

I've always admired the career path that Cruise has taken, in that he tends to pick his directors carefully, and experienced co-stars. He has a mini-Days of Thunder reunion with Robert Duvall, and you also have Richard Jenkins as a DA and Werner Herzog as the head conspirator.

Now there are other Oscar-bait movies my wife and I would have seen were any of them in a theater near us last night (Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, etc.), but since they weren't, we went with this escapist fare, and we enjoyed it.