Jack Reacher (2012)

The first film that I saw in 2012 was Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and its quite fitting that the last film of 2012 is a Tom Cruise film. Jack Reacher is based on a character created by Lee Child. I wasn’t aware of the character or author before seeing this film. The only thing I knew about it was that the character is suppose to be 280lbs and very tall and with the best will in the world, Tom Cruise is neither of those things. But I wondered whether that would make any difference to the film and to be honest it didn’t have an impact. Another thing that I wasn’t aware of was this was based on a book called One Shot which according to Wikipedia is the ninth book in the range. Quite why they didn’t go with Killing Fields instead of going for this one.

The plot of the film sees a guy named Charlie shoot dead five people (seemingly at random) and a lawyer is trying to prove doubt on him to avoid the death penalty. Jack Reacher is called in to try and help. The film seems to be plodding along when Werner Herzog turns up and instantly makes the movie better, the problem with that is he’s not on screen for very long but when he is then I’m interested. Another piece of good casting was for Robert Duvall who again is in it for very little but again I was interested when he was on screen.

The screening that I was in (which was early on a Saturday afternoon) there was a good 20-25 people there and there were a couple of instances of people laughing which when its suppose to be an action sequence is a bit unusual.  There were comedy moments which I found funny but there were times when people were laughing and I genuinally didn’t know why they were laughing. Was it that they were trying to find humour in something that wasn’t there or was it my sense of humour? Not sure about that but the thing I am sure of is that whilst watching this I felt that it was a bit like Taken where there is a guy and all he has is his quick moves.

Jack Reacher isn’t a terrible film but neither is it great. It’s middle of the road with some quite good action sequences the film suffers from being an unremarkable film. If there are to be more then they will need something