- Polish Release, cover may contain Polish text/markings. The disk has English subtitles..
When you hire Tom Cruise to be in your Tom Cruise movie, there's
never a question that you're going to get your money's worth. The
movie may not be worth the expense, but as a professional who
delivers 100 percent 100 percent of the time, Cruise will give
the proceedings his undivided attention. In Jack Reacher Cruise
plays the title character with complete gusto, and even though it
ends up a pretty run-of-the-mill crime drama, his presence and
commitment elevates this violent, bloody, and attractively
atmospheric movie to the level of, well, a reliably pleasurable
Tom Cruise experience. Jack Reacher is the protagonist in a
series of popular novels by Lee Child. There was some sniping
among fans that Cruise bears no resemblance to Child's Reacher, a
burly, shadowy former army man who has moved into the
private investigator business--but mostly for Cruise himself. No
matter; as a leading man, Cruise is always going to be himself
anyway, so the ghostlike qualities built in to his character take
on their own mythical qualities that allow both Cruise and
Reacher to get the job done. In a somewhat unsettling opening
sequence that shows a lone man killing a handful of seemingly
random people at a public park, the mystery is born and Reacher
materialises to help the sort things out. Again seemingly,
the killer has been positively identified and apprehended and is
dead-to-rights guilty. But this former army sniper asks for Jack
Reacher to suss out the deeper crazy truth. Reacher and the
alleged man have a history that dates back to their
service when Reacher investigated him for heinously murdering
civilians during a psychotic break, a crime that he really did
commit, but for which he went unpunished due to one of those
pesky legal technicalities. Nevertheless, Reacher's goal is
justice, and his investigative instincts tell him this new crime
points in an entirely different direction. There are several
sequences that play brilliantly in the context of Reacher's skill
as a killing machine on his own. One takes place in the close
confines of a tiny hallway and bathroom where Reacher faces down
a posse of thugs armed with s and a baseball bat, besting them
all in a flurry of acrobatic brutality. He also single-handedly
beats up a gang of toughs in the alley behind a bar. But the
movie's high point is an excellent chase scene between two
roaring muscle cars on the dark streets of Pittsburgh (the city
itself plays a great role throughout), with Cruise clearly and
expertly handling the wheel himself. Though somewhat convoluted,
the plot is well conceived and the large cast supports Cruise's
commanding presence nicely. Richard Jenkins and Robert Duvall do
their usual excellent work, though it is Werner Herzog as a
wildly over-the-top villain who makes things positively gleeful
in his few scenes. Of course it always comes back to Tom Cruise
and his dedication to the movie's greater good that makes Jack
Reacher so enjoyable, even when its reach exceeds its grasp.
--Ted Fry