Jack Reacher

This was great! It’s a fantastic genre film, which sprinkles one cliché after another in such a cadence that I snorted with joy for two hours. The film works in every conceivable way, from the (un)predictable story, the fitting music, and the hero’s catchphrases, to a few scenes that want to be quoted time after time (the opening, the bathroom, the chase, and even the rainy ending). This isn’t going to be the only movie theater screening. (02/01/2013)

It's hard to expect anything from a film with such a trivially simple title, ordinary marketing, and average posters. But the opposite is true. It is incredibly cleverly shot within its genre, and you have to praise the director's inventiveness and cleverness. Tom Cruise is more than just an ordinary protagonist, unlike Jason Bourne or Daniel Craig’s Bond (I love all three), but while those are followers of dynamic editing, raw directing, camera filters, and kinetic action, Jack Reacher takes it easy, with thoughtfulness and full-contact fights without any enhancements – it’s beautifully slow and hypnotic. One of the best crime films in recent years, brilliantly cast and stylistically stunning. Some shots deserve a “Hall of Fame” award, and the sound design deserves an Oscar. (11/01/2013)

You'd think they could always have gotten Nicolas Cage, since he must always be available. Instead, however, they pass the baton to Richard Krajčo's reject hobbit brother, who channels Langdon, the Equalizer, and that fighting guru with his heart in the right place, Michael Jai White, and mixes them all together with the kind of guy who goes on a castle tour and constantly snorts mockingly at every sentence the tour guide utters. It's a film so monumentally lacking in charisma that even Rosamund Pike rolls her cleavage on the table out of boredom, just to give the viewer motivation to sit through the scene. When a bunch of frenetic humor starts coming out of nowhere, it's like someone making fart noises with their armpits at their parents' funeral, and I've forgotten to mention the action scenes, which have no concept or choreography whatsoever, but are dominated by the kind of exposition that puts Ben Hur to shame. And most importantly, I don't know, but if according to the ratings this film really offers that whiff of the "good old-fashioned decent" crime film that makes every one and a half people here clutch at their hearts, I don't understand the low rating of Road House, which it kept reminded me of. (27/04/2015)

Cruise as the adopted son of Steven Seagal and James Bond? No, more of a tired guy next door who had seen and experienced too much, and coincidentally, most of it consisted of ingenious deductions and fights with green brains. McQuarrie likes traditional genres, in The Way of the Gun he borrowed from a western, while here he worships an old-fashioned slow thriller with slowly dosed information and anachronically slow tracking-shots and disturbing hints. It's not bad at all, at least if one accepts this vague relationship between camp and deadly seriousness. I really enjoyed the exposition (which everyone curses), but I found myself fading a lot during the scenes where Cruise a) moralizes (does he really feel that someone is going to believe the anti-system rebel?), b) interrupts the speeches of other characters almost like a mythical superhero, although there is no reason to do anything like that. As a detective story, it works (there are not that many of them, so you will appreciate it if some deductive twist is successful), as a thriller it has a beard-mustache-leather charm, as camp there are plenty of attractions (Herzog and Duvall are perfect, the bathroom battle potentially iconic). As the thriller start of the "Reacher" series? Well, I didn't understand at all what McQuarrie wanted to pull out against the competition, apart from the confused rambling between humor and seriousness, successful self-defeating jokes and a world where they pretend to have ultra-realism, and for a while the string that the original A-Team strummed. If he avoided the heroic bombast and kept his feet on the ground, it could have been a dignified, prudent crime film. But that wouldn't be enough for Jack Reacher, would it? Four stars for having had a lot of fun for most of the two hours, sometimes perhaps against the dignified intentions of the creators and little Tom's persistent efforts to be as hard as granite in his fifties and as seductive as Cupid. P.S. Someone should explain to Chris that blondes with big eyes are nice, but their unreasonable staring into the camera doesn't seem witty at all. (19/12/2012)

Today was the day I'd been saving the Jack for. It suited me perfectly. Great action, at times the shots of Jack driving reminded me of similar shots in Speed Racer. Jack was smart and cocky, but he wasn't immortal and he didn't know everything. He's just a really good ex-soldier. Helen had beautiful eyes that hid an intelligence that could expect not to be subjected to blonde jokes. Honestly I'd quite like to read the book because I'd like to know what was going through Jack's mind, that's how intrigued I was by his character. I had fun, Tom didn't come across as stunted, and the story moved along smartly. There was no room for pity, finally. (21/03/2016)