And the award for the most poorly timed release of the year goes to… Jack Reacher!

Less than a month will have passed since the tragic events of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut when Jack Reacher hits movie screens across the country and some will find that entirely inappropriate.

Jack Reacher is far from a realistic, hard hitting portrayal of life, however, the opening sequence very graphically depicts a sniper randomly killing 5 innocent people; including one who is targeted while holding a small child in her arms.

It might be going too far to ask the studio to hold off the release because of the incident but I can say that I was shaken by the opening sequence and could feel the tension in the air around me as everyone in the theater made the same immediate, albeit unintentional, connection to real life events.

Having said that, as the movie continued it became less and less relatable to real life so the tension definitely eased as the story unfolded. But I do think, if nothing else, reactions to this film will inform the nationwide debate on gun control and quite possibly the role that the media plays in these shameful events.

Now, on to the film itself.

Although I was unaware of the following that this character already had thanks to the 16 volume book series, it is undeniably the case. Many hard core fans of the books are waiting to see if Tom Cruise has what it takes to overcome his God given 5’7” stature to portray the titular character who, in the books, is described as a towering and imposing 6’ 5” hulk of a man.

For me, Tom Cruise was what we often times expect him to be in roles like this… himself; which is by no means a bad thing, mind you. The reason that he’s a worldwide superstar is because people love him. In any action roll, be it as Jack Reacher or Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible franchise, we want to see that mix of charm, skill and fearlessness that he always projects. And once again, he delivers that in spades.

Other than being slightly more contained in this character than we generally think the often times passionate, excitable Tom to be, he’s back to being America’s action hero and that’s exactly what the role called for.

Can we also mention that somehow this man is now 50 years old? Say what you will, most of us would give almost anything to look as good as he does. Kudos to the team responsible for that!

Jai Courtney, whom you may remember from the first season of the Starz Original Series, Spartacus: Blood and Sand is the man pitted against Cruise for most of the movie and wowza does he do a great job with it!

His stunning good looks and smoldering

subdued nature make him the perfect villain. He may be the man to help an old lady cross the street, or he may shoot her in the head and steal her walker… you just don’t know which! In a movie that could have very easily called for cookie cutter foes, Jai Courtney adds some much appreciated layers to his scenes. I’m predicting some big things for this guys’ future.

Rosamund Pike plays a beautiful attorney who is only out for justice and who also serves as the intended source of sexual tension for Reacher. For whatever reason though, the latter never seems to happen.

Pike competently executes her part but I couldn’t get the image of Stephanie March as ADA Alex Cabot on TV’s Law & Order: SVU out of my mind. The roles are basically identical and March rocked that part so I would have loved to have seen her in there instead.

I also have to mention, in a completely non-sexist way, that her breasts deserve some sort of award nomination of their own. Second time feature Director Christopher McQuarrie went to extreme lengths to make certain that they were as heavily featured as possible. Everything from costume choices, specific lighting, and even adjusting the frame of certain shots were all used to highlight them.

There’s a close up in the film where Pike is seated at a desk on a phone call that would have normally ended just below her neck to frame it properly. He basically went wider on the shot so that her boobs would heave in and out of frame as she spoke. Granted, both she and her breasts are gorgeous, but going to such lengths to shove them in the audiences face was a bit tacky.

The film itself is a hodgepodge of tones. It’s never sure of what it wants to be, so it tries to be a lot of different things. We have some very serious, grounded scenes like the opening sequence mixed in with the traditional ‘cheesy action one liner’ moments, as well as a fight scene in a bathtub that I swear to God was taken from a Three Stooges sketch. There’s also homage to the classic ‘O.K. Corral’ western shoot out scene, except in this version our hero is reaching for the clutch on his car and not the gun at his side.

Additionally, several moments leading up to shoot outs or fight scenes would be stalled by something unexpected happening like a car not starting, or a knife being dropped and sometimes these unanticipated shifts kept the movie from going down that ‘same old, same old’ path, but more often it was completely jarring and came across as juvenile filmmaking.

I’m predicting audiences to be really split on their opinions of this one. Between the Connecticut school shooting, the predictable characters and this odd haphazard

tone, it has the odds stacked pretty heavily against it. But, the popularity of the books and the fact that no matter what, people still love Tom Cruise might be enough to get audiences on their side.

I can’t imagine this growing into the franchise that they were hoping for but based on some of the reactions I’ve been hearing around town, I could be dead wrong. I just know that aside from Jai Courtney’s performance this film didn’t have me Reaching for anything but the door.

Synopsis:

A homicide investigator digs deeper into a case involving a trained military sniper who shot five random victims. Based on a book in Lee Child’s crime series.