Jack Reacher
Director: Christopher McQuarrie.
Starring: Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike.
Reviewed by Ben Carey.
[rating: 2.5/5]
After seeing the first trailer for Jack Reacher I thought it looked like a poor man’s Mission Impossible, but after seeing the second trailer I thought it might be more like Drive. When I saw the film I realised that it was nothing like either of these things. Oh how misleading a trailer can be. Regardless, I was still drawn to it by the sheer Tom Cruise factor. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with him as an actor in the past, however, that said I can’t deny that whenever he is in a film, there is a certain energy attached to the production.
When a crazed sniper takes out five random people in an American city, an ex-military investigator by the name of Jack Reacher (Cruise) is called in by the accused to examine the evidence. Reacher begins working with Helen (Pike), the accused’s attorney and together they discover that the case which at first seemed black and white has developed into something far more complex, and Reacher becomes more involved in the investigation than he would like.
Tom Cruise steals the show with his remarkable portrayal of Tom Cruise. But hey, that’s what you go to see, and he delivers, so the Tom Cruise factor in this movie is very good. It’s a shame I can’t say the same about the script.
The overall plot is quite weak and has many thinly disguised holes. The antagonists are poorly developed, have weak motivations, and, at times, slapstick routines. The dialogue is 90% awful and 10% surprisingly well delivered clichés. One of my favourite lines came when Reacher was about to get into a bar fight over a girl. She says, ‘It’s okay, I don’t mind the sight of blood’, to which he replies, ‘Well, it means you’re not pregnant at least.’ These kind of cringe-worthy lines are scattered throughout the film.
All that said, there are good points as well. The car chase is kind of rad, filled with the deep, satisfying purr of American muscle cars. I have never said this before, but I think this movie needed more car chases. There are a few blatant expository moments in the film where they just tell you exactly what’s going on, but there are also a few scenes where Reacher does a Sherlock Holmes and deduces things from the evidence. Complete with visual flashbacks and curiosity-inspiring music, I thought these segments were really effective. I just wish they weren’t so out of place with the rest of the film. The final shootout is also pretty cool and actually manages to bring some fresh ideas to a very stale genre. Robert Duvall’s character is fantastic and probably the highlight of the film for me.
All in all, Jack Reacher is entertaining but not engaging. A weak plot and even weaker antagonists provide for a very unbelievable narrative which manages somehow to stretch out to the two hour mark. Honestly. What were they thinking? There are some good Sherlock Holmes moments, a great car chase, and a pretty cool final shootout. But these are just fragments, they don’t piece together to make a good film. These are all things that you could enjoy on YouTube, without having to sit through the other 110 minutes of the film.
