Jack Reacher

I saw this movie two Sundays ago with a bunch of my male cousins. It's a decent guy movie - there's a man on a mission in the context of an investigative procedural, and he engages in personal combat with the bad guys. There is some chivalry but that does retain some appeal when the man does it from a position of strength. We were all entertained.

Jack Reacher is a drifter. When explaining why, he says in the movie that he wanted to experience the freedom that he was supposedly defending as a soldier but then he points out the various people working in the office building across from the office of Rosamund Pike's character, saying that they are not free, not free from anxiety, fear, insecurity, and so on. Though he does not say it, he could say that they are a bunch of serfs, wage slaves who have no real control over their own lives.

Would a Jack Reacher movie have been made without the backing of Tom Cruise. It does seem like a vanity project for him, who can't help but pretend to be someone manlier than he actually is. When he says his lines he comes off as being cocky, much like the younger Cruise of the '80s. I find his acting annoying in that respect; is it really acting? Would the movie have been better if they had found someone who fit Lee Child's description in the novels? Aaron Eckhart? The police investigator, played by David Oyelowo, asks a motel clerk which of the guests is capable of killing someone with one punch. She thinks short Tom Cruise?

When he's not being cocky, he is earnest in the delivery of his lines, but that does not make up for the fact that he may not embody the character that well because he is unable to show that he has a certain background with the right sort of gestures or mannerisms and so on - the physical acting. (Just as he was rather miscast for Claus von Stauffenberg in Valkyrie.) The photo of Tom Cruise in an ACU did not convince me that he was an ex-army officer. His physique was a bit different in this movie, not as muscular as he was for the Mission:Impossible movies? Sarge thought it looked a bit strange. I think Cruise wanted to look like he was a fit, middle-aged man and not have too much muscle.

I agree with one reviewer that dropping his gun in order to engage in personal combat with one of the villians, mano-a-mano, was a bit silly. I was reminded of the end of the first Lethal Weapon movie as well.

I would like to see more Jack Reacher movies, but it wouldn't bother me if they recast the part.

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