On general release from Wed 26 Dec
Christopher McQuarrie / USA / 2012 / 130 min
What a tired old format films like this adopt: ex-militaryman solves a crime involving another ex-militaryman. Surprisingly, Christopher McQuarrie offers a shocking adaptation of Lee Child’s One Shot to tell of Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise), a renegade nomad drafted in to investigate a massacre after foul play is suspected. All is not so simple, as a network of evildoers is crassly involved at the helm of it all – and it’s Reacher’s job to stop them. How about that?
For all there might be moments of entertainment here (the opening sniper sequence is mildly gripping), it is largely overwritten, washy tripe posing as dramatic storytelling. Even if some of it is tongue-in-cheek (‘you don’t find Reacher, he finds you’), it’s an open invitation for more dodgy whodunits that can turn in poorly written screenplays and call themselves light-hearted. At times, it borders on genre parody, overreaching to the seriousness of noiresque crime (a la The Way of the Gun) but with as much intelligence as a rerun of Midsomer Murders.
Even as a character, Reacher is boring – morally ambivalent and corrupt on the one hand (only cares about justice so long as he himself dispenses it) yet concerned with truth, integrity and decency on the other. Cruise plays it as best he can but the depth is pseudo-psychological, suggesting complexity and intricacy but really playing on cliché; and as much as Werner Herzog is a genius behind the lens, he delivers a stiff, pantomime villain performance as a one-eyed baddie here. Who even knows what’s going on with Rosamund Pike’s character, Helen, the lawyer hired to defend the accused; she’s stupid, insufferable and false yet somehow plays a pivotal role in a film which is crazily overlong and as desperately trashy as the horse it rode in on. Hopefully they’ll nip this in the bud before tackling all seventeen of Child’s Reacher books.