It’s weird that “Jack Reacher” is so disappointing because Cruise is, per usual, charismatic, witty, and sardonic in it, and his physicality is still there, and ultimately, the ladies love him. (In fact, the movie keeps reminding us of this by making every woman Reacher encounters fall under his spell, like the elderly pawn shop attendant and the lawyer he’s working for.) And the movie is written and directed by longtime Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, who helped rewrite “Ghost Protocol” and is supposed to be writing its sequel and another Cruise film follow-up, “Top Gun 2”; you would think, after years of working together, that McQuarrie and Cruise would know what works for each other and for audiences. That together, they would be capable of something great.
Alas, “Jack Reacher” is not something great. It is not even something good. An adaptation of “One Shot,” a 2005 novel by Lee Child in his series about the fictional character Reacher, an ex-Army cop with great fighting skills, a practically photographic memory, and a strong sense of morality, this action movie never finds the right footing to connect with audiences. The plot, in which Reacher faces a shadowy foreign corporation, seems undeniably antiquated. The writing is too uneven and inconsistent, presenting Reacher as a lady’s man and a strong defender of women and a great investigator and a super-genius and an unhinged vigilante and a doubter of local government. He sidles up next to women shirtless, and then threatens a villain by saying he wants to drink a “boot full of [that guy’s] blood.” He calls a girl who tried to entrap him as a sexual predator “sweet,” and then evades and escapes from police. In trying so hard to make Reacher so amazing, Cruise and McQuarrie have made him a caricature. And without a strong protagonist, “Jack Reacher” is really about nothing at all.
The film focuses on five murders supposedly committed by ex-Army sniper James Barr (Joseph Sikora) in Pittsburgh, who asks for Reacher by name before being put in a coma by overzealous fellow inmates. All the evidence found by Detective Emerson (David Oyelowo, of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “The Help,” “Red Tails,” and “Lincoln”) points to Barr, and when Reacher (Cruise, of “Rock of Ages” and “Knight and Day”) unexpectedly shows up, he’s convinced, too. Until he starts butting heads with Barr’s attorney, Helen (Rosamund Pike, of “Johnny English Reborn,” “The Big Year,” and “Wrath of the Titans”), and ends up agreeing to be her lead investigator. As he starts considering all the facts, Reacher begins to think Barr might actually be innocent—and he’s being framed by someone who needed to commit the murders, someone who wanted something from one of those people.
In getting pulled into that web, Reacher starts suspecting everyone around him—could Emerson be corrupt, or maybe Helen’s father Alex (Richard Jenkins, of “Dear John,” “Let Me In,” “Friends with Benefits,” and “Hall Pass”), the district attorney?—and begins to realize the culprit here, the real threat, is bigger than either he or Helen can handle individually. They’ll need to work together, using all of Reacher’s physical and mental assets, to nail the bad guys and clear Barr. And if they get attracted to each other along the way, well, that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Perhaps if the film wasn’t so consumed with fanning Cruise’s ego, it could have been something. But as it stands, it’s two-plus hours of Cruise worship: Pike’s character Helen fawns over him, showing more cleavage as the film progresses; a girl who tries to seduce him and is shot down still asks for a date after he embarrasses her; all the other male characters, even Robert Duvall’s grumpy, sarcastic old Marine Cash, aren’t as manly as he is. No one can come close to Jack Reacher, no one at all.
Of course, this has something to do with how Child crafted the character, in his novels, to be one of upstanding alpha male dominance. At the same time, though, it’s impossible to not get frustrated with how much the movie pushes forward the Cruise persona. He’s a good actor, sure, and he’s likeable enough in the role. That’s not enough, however, to counter a movie that lacks development for every other character, good guys or bad; has numerous visual inconsistencies, such as when it’s raining one minute in a scene and is bone-dry the next; and is just so dumbly improbable. Every time the main villain came onscreen, people at the film’s press screening broke into laughter at just how stupid his plan was, and how ridiculous its presentation. When no one is afraid of your bad guy, how can they care about his defeat?
The film’s best moments are when Cruise gets to be a sardonic jerk, because it’s such an against-type thing for him, and when the tension really, really builds, like the dialogue-less introduction that tracks the sniper as he watches his victims through his rifle’s crosshairs, shooting them one by one in an agonizingly long, supremely painful sequence. The amount of rage and sympathy that introduction builds up, especially given the tragic events earlier this month in Newtown, Conn., feel cheap because the emotions don’t go anywhere. The film does nothing with them. Instead, “Jack Reacher” is a disappointing illusion—an overly long string of car chases, shootouts, and threats against women with very little thought beneath the façade.
