Runtime: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Quick Impressions:
I’ve never liked Tom Cruise. Well, no, it’s more than that. I’ve always hated him—not as a person. As a person he’s quite intriguing and makes the world a more interesting place. (And also, I remember him rescuing some people drowning on a yacht once when I was a teenager, so that was nice of him.) But I just don’t find his screen persona appealing in any way, and that’s always bothered me because when I was kid, everybody was always gushing about his amazingness, and I just didn’t get it. I still don’t.
And yet I keep going to his movies. Why do I do it? Why?
On the flip side, I’ve always liked Rosamund Pike—at least, I found her a genuine bright spot in the otherwise pretty appalling Die Another Die, and I liked her as Jane in the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice. But her performance in this movie…
Oh dear.
I should really save this for later in the review, but—despite Jack Reacher’s many entertaining elements—what impressed me most about the movie was Rosamund Pike’s performance. This is probably unduly harsh of me, but honestly, Pike’s character reminded me of someone doped up on cold medicine—the wide, staring eyes, the perpetually flared nostrils, the mouth always open as if gasping for air. And every now and then, we’d get a nice long look at her big, round breasts. (The camera seems determined to linger here, in case we forgot Pike has breasts.) Honestly—round eyes, round nostrils, round mouth, round breasts! When I left the theater I wanted to go home and build a snowman! And I’m sure that snowman would have had exactly the same emotional range as Rosamund Pike displays in this movie.
I don’t blame the actress, though. I’m fairly confident that the director is trying to elicit this sort of performance because David Oyelowo (whose work I’ve always liked before) does a lot of similar stuff—eyes as wide as possible all the time as if something of the greatest urgency is happening at every single moment.
Cruise doesn’t widen his eyes, but he does do an awful lot of staring. I’ve got to think that director Christopher McQuarrie (probably best known for writing The Usual Suspects) wanted them all to act like this. Maybe he did it to build suspense. (You sit there on the edge of your seat thinking, Why is the director encouraging melodramatic performances like these? Why?
Why? I must know!)
The Good:
Despite Rosmund Pike’s perpetually alarmed performance and my stated feelings about Tom Cruise, Jack Reacher is actually a pretty entertaining popcorn movie with quite a bit going for it.
I must admit, even though I’m not fond of Cruise, he seems the perfect choice to embody such an eccentric character. (I haven’t read Lee Child’s novels, but based on what we learn about Reacher in the film, the casting of Tom Cruise seems ideal.)
It’s not that I think Cruise is a terrible actor. I actually enjoyed his performance in Interview with a Vampire, and I loved the movie Rain Man. (Of course, I saw it for the first time when I was ten and haven’t watched it again since, so you’d hardly call it my favorite movie. But I honestly did love it and started reading up on autism after seeing it.) History has proven that if given the choice between watching Top Gun with my family and cleaning my room, I will choose to watch Top Gun. And once I flipped over to Far and Away in progress on TV and got totally sucked into it and ended up watching it until the end (despite the incessant commercial interruptions that came about every five minutes).
Cruise does make a convincing Reacher. The problem is, I have a serious (and totally irrational) bias against Cruise, so because I’m not crazy about Cruise, I have a hard time liking Reacher, even though he’s passably witty and physically impressive enough to take a knife to a gun fight. One of the previews before the movie starred Jason Statham, so I kept thinking to myself, Maybe Jason Statham would have been more convincing in this role. I would have preferred watching Bruce Willis, but of course, he would have been totally wrong for the character.
That brings me to a second problem, the inverse of the one I’ve been discussing. At times, I really didn’t like Jack Reacher, either, and that made it harder for me to like Tom Cruise’s performance. To me, Jack Reacher seems more likely to be the person some guy who got kicked out of the military delusionally believes that he is than to exist for real. He’s like a cross between Catch 22’s Yossarian and Superman. He lives in a completely ridiculous and barely feasible way because he doesn’t want to be accountable to anyone.
Who always buys new clothes every day, owns nothing, “borrows” a car whenever he needs one, and interacts with no other human beings on a regular basis? That’s an awful lot of trouble just to seem mysterious. My husband pointed out, “Some people just want to be left alone.”
So then why is he starring in a movie? (I realize that the character is not starring in a movie, but he did ride into town like the hero in some Western to take center stage in a murder investigation that really had nothing to do with him. It’s like he came bounding into the thick of things in a Superman suit, booming out, “Hello citizens, I prefer to be inconspicuous!”)
Reacher carries himself with an air of smug superiority all because he refuses to let social norms influence him. To me, he often seemed like a self-righteous sociopath. But then sometimes I liked him because 1) He was awfully witty and 2) Everyone else in the movie was either evil or stupid.
So it boils down to this. I think I would have liked the movie more if someone other than Tom Cruise had starred, but, sadly, I don’t think anyone else would have made a more convincing Jack Reacher than Tom Cruise.
The supporting performances really shine because the lead actors are all being so ridiculously melodramatic that the more naturalistic turns by minor characters stand out in a good way. As the grieving father of one of the victims, James Martin Kelly has a very small part, really only one scene, but he seems like the best actor in the world next to Rosamund Pike with her ever-widening eyes and flaring nostrils. (Moments that should have been intense actually lost their sting because she dialed it all the way up immediately and looked like she was about to be stabbed any time she had a serious conversation with anyone about anything.)
As misguided, ill-fated Sandy, Alexia Fast is pretty fantastic. She brings a lot of energy and seemingly natural sparkle to the part. Richard Jenkins is also good and much less over-the-top than everyone else around him. And Robert Duvall makes his part in the movie both memorable and fun, even though the character’s role in the story is actually a bit odd when you take a step back and think about it. Duvall is someone who knows what to do when
he’s in front of a movie camera, and he does it.
But the villains steal the movie. I’ve been curious about Jai Courtney since I heard he’ll be playing John McClane’s son in the next Die Hard movie. Unlike many people, I’ve never seen the Spartacus series on Starz and was unfamiliar with Courtney until seeing Jack Reacher. I must say I was impressed. Courtney definitely has charisma and screen presence. Still better, he has actual acting talent. He makes the villainous henchman Charlie an absolute joy to watch, a creepy yet charming thug who brings with him a definite note of genuine menace.
And wow, Werner Herzog! (I don’t think I’ve ever seen him act before. Apparently, he’s in What Dreams May Come, but I don’t remember his performance at all.) Herzog is just fantastic. He’s so creepy, so menacing, so evil, and so weird. Even though his character seems to be basically what Alfred Hitchcock would have called a “MacGuffin,” Herzog is still a joy to watch (though it seems odd to use the word “joy” of a performance grounded in terror).
Best Scene Visually:
The opening scene is chilling. A gunman targets victims in his rifle sight and proceeds to pick them off from afar. The timing of this movie’s release is semi-tragic since many people will undoubtedly be reminded of recent events in Connecticut. Even if you’re not thinking of Newtown while you watch this scene (which seems impossible), it’s still strangely disturbing. We get to see the people close up before they’re killed. We get to see their faces. We get to see the killer take the time to focus on them and become aware of them. It’s not like we’re just watching the chaos or seeing somebody spray out bullets from afar. We’re watching a highly controlled act of deliberate evil. It’s quite chilling, far more disturbing than I would have expected, and definitely memorable.
(The worst scene visually is also easy to single out. It’s that surreal moment at the gun range when Reacher is trying to rise to the owner’s challenge.)
Funniest Scene:
By far, the bathtub scene was my favorite in the movie. (Oddly enough, my husband liked this scene least.) To me, this scene energized a movie until then had been relatively slow and incredibly predictable.
I can honestly say that I wasn’t expecting what happened at all. (And according to my husband, that’s because it never should have happened.) It’s like the villain decided, “I need some hired muscle to take this guy out. Somebody get me the Three Stooges.” The scene was a strange mix of absurdist comedy, outright slapstick, graphic violence, and a plumber’s nightmare. It was like Tom Cruise had suddenly wandered into Fargo or maybe a Nancy Drew book.
I really loved the scene because it was so different. It was also just really weird (like life often is) in a movie in which everything else always seemed to work out perfectly, exactly as expected.
The bathtub scene also ushers in the action-comedy finish of a film that in its first act is a ploddingly slow crime procedural.
Ordinarily, I’m bored by action scenes and prefer lots of close-ups of people talking and reacting. But in this movie, I enjoyed the zany, action-packed part of the movie a lot more.
(The thing is, if you’re going to be zoomed up in people’s faces watching them closely, those people must be good actors whose interactions are worth watching. Rosamund Pike plays every scene like she’s in a silent horror movie, and Tom Cruise acts like he’s just a really cool guy hanging out being cool.)
Best Action Sequence:
The car chase near the end has great sound. Based on sound alone, it’s one of the best scenes in the movie. But visually, I found it a bit hard to follow. Reacher is driving around, and the cops are chasing him. He’s making turns, apparently attempting to escape by some logical method, but I couldn’t figure out the significance of any of his steering choices. We saw him sitting inside the car a lot, heard the engine revving. There’s something likable and frustrating about the scene all at once.
Reacher trying to figure out how to make do with the back-up he’s given makes the grand finale at the end highly amusing and entertaining. There’s a surprising amount of comedy in the scene, and Cruise actually charmed me a little as he tried to figure out what on earth to do with his knife.
Best Scene:
Personally I liked the brief scene Jai Courtney shared with Alexia Fast, simply because both of them seemed so interesting and energetic.
Also exceptional is the scene introducing the beyond creepy arch villain The Zec, played to spookily sinister perfection by Werner Herzog. The great thing about Herzog’s character is that he’s so much more evil than he needs to be. We begin the movie thinking, Okay, this is an interesting premise for a twisty crime procedural.
And then suddenly we’re introduced to a villain who seems like he should be sending out the Nazgȗl in search of the One Ring. Peter Jackson should have scrapped the idea of that relatively bland pale Orc and hired Werner Herzog to hunt down Thorin Oakenshield.
The Negatives:
Speaking of The Hobbit, people who complained about tonal inconsistencies in that film would probably have a fit after seeing Jack Reacher. The type of villain we get is so unexpected and feels a lot like overkill.
The “wrong man” type of crime drama is really common. What’s not common is having the guy who really did it be working for someone so evil that he somehow poses a threat to the entire Western World just by existing.
I’m reminded of a joke a friend’s younger brother once told us (to his mother’s horror). Q: What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple? A: The Holocaust.
Herzog is the bogeyman, the embodiment of children’s nightmares (and of Jack Reacher’s rather specific nightmares, for that matter). He seems out of place in the movie, but on the other hand, he’s the best thing about it.
Jack Reacher has a long, slow opening that sets up one kind of movie. But then it delivers a completely different kind of movie.
Imagine watching a movie where the conflict is tightly focused on a Little League game. Can little Johnny manage to hit the ball and get on base this time? Surely he can. He’s been practicing and practicing. Then the pitcher hurls the ball toward him, everybody tenses up, and then—the Earth is destroyed by a meteor.
That’s what Jack Reacher felt like to me.
One thing that really got under my skin was Reacher’s final showdown with Jai Courtney’s
Charlie. I watched a choice Reacher made and noted, I think this illustrates a difference between men and women. I’m not sure that generalization is really true—seems pretty broad—but it definitely illustrated a difference between my husband and me. We had a discussion about it in the car for over half an hour. I think Reacher makes a decision that is just not sensible. My husband sees it as the proper thing to do in the situation. Without giving any spoilers, I will say that after much discussion, we discovered that each of us characterized the encounter differently. We conceived of it as motivated by different things, with different things at stake.
That discussion actually made me understand more clearly what I found so hard to understand about Jack Reacher. What exactly is at stake? From my point of view, the movie failed to resolve anything (or at the very least resolved a different conflict than it
presented us with originally). I don’t want to spoil anything, but I had several unanswered questions, and when my husband answered them, his answers just prompted new questions.
As much as I liked the villain, I didn’t understand what was going on with him. What’s the point of it all? And what is motivating Emerson? He says something that makes us suspect we will find out more about him, but we don’t.
Also, Robert Duvall’s character questions just enough to make us suddenly wonder why he’s gotten involved at all. (His protests bring too much reality to the situation and make it nearly impossible to suspend disbelief.)
Richard Jenkins’s character tells his daughter that what she’s saying makes her sound delusional, and I agree. The whole thing starts to get so weird that it’s somewhat more satisfying to imagine the entire movie as a hallucination suffered by the guy in custody after he gets beaten up by the other prisoners.
There are just too many loose ends. And how long were those two guys friends? It seemed like a while. The whole thing seems like a needlessly elaborate scheme to me.
The movie seems to change genres in the middle, and while I like the action flick it transformed into better than the original film, the metamorphosis is a bit jarring.
Another real problem is the lack of range from Pike and Cruise. The movie has a clever premise and often great dialogue. It should work better than it does, but Pike is always so intense all the time that she can’t deliver genuine intensity when it’s actually required. She’s like the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Throughout the entire movie, she looks shocked and afraid for her life. When we need to believe her, we don’t anymore.
The script is also really clunky. The story contains plenty of surprising twists—only I was able to anticipate most of them well in advance. The movie has a cool concept but relatively clumsy execution. It’s easy to imagine that the source novel is more enjoyable to experience.
The ham-fisted delivery of the movie’s “moral” annoyed me, too. If I want a movie to tell me that the trappings of society make all of us prisoners, I’ll just watch Fight Club because it’s much funnier.
Overall:
Actually, I enjoyed parts of Jack Reacher very much, as did my family. None of us hated it, but nobody liked it all that much either. Robert Duvall is lots of fun, Werner Herzog is fantastically creepy, and Jai Courtney’s winning turn made me quite excited for Die Hard. If you’re a Tom Cruise fan, then you should definitely see this movie. He’s in practically every scene, and he seems perfect as the too often too-good-to-be-true Reacher. The movie provides plenty of delightful action, though you have to wait a while for it to get warmed up.