Paramount Pictures
I can’t smoke pot at home anymore because it makes me a violent amnesiac. So I do it at the movies! This week: Tom Cruise tries to tackle a gritty action role in Jack Reacher.
Have you been keeping track of this whole Tom Cruise buying a girlfriend through Scientology disaster? It’s basically made it completely impossible for me to take that guy seriously in anything anymore. Like I couldn’t even buy him in Tropic Thunder. He’s just such a weird cult joke. They could make a show like Big Love about him. Call it Small Love. Why do I not have like a million dollars right now? Make it happen.
Anyways it’s even harder to take him seriously in Jack Reacher if you’ve read even one of the books this movie is based on. Jack Reacher the character is basically like a Daniel Craig type, a scarred, surly drifter who just does not give a frack about things. Tom Cruise isn’t that guy. He really doesn’t work as that guy and him trying to act like a damaged, mysterious antihero is laughable. Sure, the fight scenes are shot to make him look like a bruiser, but it’s Tom Cruise, for God’s sake. He works as an Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible where he’s a cunning little smooth operator but this is just idiotic.
The story is stupid as Hell – a sniper kills five people and frames a dude for it but the dude’s not really guilty so he’s all “CALL JACK REACHER” and Jack Reacher comes to town to Figure It Out. There’s a twist, of course, and the twist is stupid of course. I’d spoil it for you but if you’ve seen any CSI episodes in the last six years you can probably guess it. In between there’s fights and car chases and all of the crap you expect from a movie like this, none of it done well.
There is a pretty good thing in this movie, and that’s the continuing employment of legendary German director Werner Herzog as “The Zec,” a Russian gulag survivor who chewed off his own fingers. I’m sure the paycheck from this flick is going to go to an actual good movie, so that’s something.
Disclaimer: I fixed all of the typos and grammar errors but left everything else in.