Starring Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, David Oyelowo, Werner Herzog, Jai Courtney, Vladimir Sizov, Joseph Sikora, Michael Raymond-James, Alexia Fast, Josh Helman, Robert Duvall
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Expectations: Really low.
The marketing for Jack Reacher — at least the one trailer I saw — did the film a disservice by playing up Tom Cruise’s badass character and completely avoiding the fact that the film is a mystery. Thankfully for me, I like mysteries and badass dudes so it was a win-win for me. But if I’m being completely honest, the main reason that I cared to see this one was Werner Herzog. My love for Herzog and his sweet, dulcet tones were enough to make me brave this movie for which the trailer instilled zero interest in me. Herzog is barely in the film and he’s only given one real standout scene, but that honestly didn’t matter so much as the film’s mystery is pretty fun to unravel.
But make no mistake: some of the stuff in this movie is flat-out preposterous. Like how Jack Reacher becomes involved in actively working on the case even though he’s a rogue loner with no agency affiliations. Sure, he used to be a military police officer, but “used to be” doesn’t usually cut it when it comes to investigating murder cases. If the movie wasn’t any good, you could really hinge a whole review on this moment as the point of no return. But the movie is pretty good, so we can overlook a couple of suspension of disbelief issues to get our guy into a few good movie situations.