Whenever James Stewart played a character, he was always a little bit James Stewart; that’s a good thing. Cary Grant was always a little bit Cary Grant — also a good thing. But Tom Cruise, through a career that’s spanned some 30 years, is almost always very much Tom Cruise. And that, particularly in Jack Reacher, can be a very tiresome thing.
Among those who have read and loved Lee Child’s enormously popular Jack Reacher novels, the big complaint about Cruise’s having cast himself as Child’s burly, laconic protagonist is that he’s the wrong physical type. Cruise doesn’t have the strapping stature of Child’s Reacher, although he is extraordinarily fit — lest we fail to notice, he appears shirtless several times in the picture. He’s also pretty good at pulling off the hand-to-hand combat at which Reacher excels.
The bigger problem is that Cruise, as Reacher, has no wit and no style, other than the studiously applied kind. He’s so desperate to do everything right that nearly everything he does comes off all wrong. And though director Christopher McQuarrie — who also adapted the screenplay, from Child’s novel One Shot — shows some visual intelligence, he doesn’t do enough to goad Cruise into giving this performance some shape. Cruise’s idea of characterization consists chiefly of glaring and tightening his jawline. How could readers who love Jack Reacher not expect more?
At least McQuarrie, a veteran screenwriter who made his big splash with The Usual Suspects and also did some reworking of last year’s moderately enjoyable Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, has good storytelling instincts. (This is the second film he’s directed; the first was 2000’s The Way of the Gun, with Ryan Phillippe and Benicio Del Toro.) The picture opens with an extended wordless sequence that sets up the plot in precise visual language: A man whom we later learn — or believe — is a trained Army sniper heads to a specific urban locale in Pittsburgh and coolly picks off five human beings in the span of a few minutes. The suspect, an anonymous-looking guy named Barr (Joseph Sikora), is immediately arrested and taken into custody, where he’s quizzed by a detective (David Oyelowo) and the DA (Richard Jenkins). The two try to force a confession out of the suspect, but instead, he scrawls on a sheet of paper, “Get Jack Reacher.”