Jack Reacher (2012) * *

Directed by:  Christopher McQuarrie

Starring:  Tom Cruise, Richard Jenkins, Rosamund Pike, Werner Herzog, Jai Courtney, Robert
Duvall

Tom Cruise's greatest strength is his absolute conviction even when given goofy characters to play or strange dialogue to recite.    Jack Reacher is a former military detective who fell off the grid after serving in Afghanistan.     He has no address, phone number, email address, pays for everything in cash (although how does he get cash?), and seems to disappear like the wind.    He is also an expert sharpshooter and hand-to-hand combat extraordinaire.     If we sent Reacher after Bin Laden, he would've been captured days after 9/11.

Jack Reacher starts out interestingly enough as a gunman armed with a rifle guns down five seemingly innocent victims.   He is positioned in a parking garage across the river from the victims and killed the five people on six bullets.    The suspect is quickly identified as James Barr, a combat veteran who writes "Get Jack Reacher" during his interrogation and soon after is beaten into a coma on the way to his holding cell.     Jack Reacher appears just as the local DA (Jenkins) and the cop investigating the case are discussing his history.    He seems to be right there when you need him at all times.

Reacher is a thorough researcher of evidence and is able to piece together quickly that Barr is innocent and conducts a search for the real killer.    His trail leads to a real estate magnate named The Zec (Herzog), who is evil and survived his stay in a Russian gulag by gnawing off his fingers when they became frostbitten.     He also has one blue eye and one blind eye, which is another tipoff to how malicious he is.    No hero looks like that.   

The trouble with Reacher is he is too clever.   He returns quick, witty, hard-boiled responses to questions and soon enough, it becomes apparent that Reacher is simply an instrument of violence and justice, not a real human being.    He knows things before everyone else and dares Barr's attorney (Pike) to catch up with him.    How does he know everything?    And why does he make everyone jump through hoops to find out what he already knows?    Dealing with Reacher must be very frustrating.    

Jack Reacher begins as a whodunit and then becomes yet another action flick with endless car chases, shootouts, and mano y mano fights in which Reacher bends body parts in ways not intended.     The baddie has Reacher dead to rights, but chooses to fistfight with him instead and of course loses badly.   Indiana Jones had the right idea when he shot the swordsman in Raiders Of The Lost Ark instead of humoring him with fisticuffs.    However, I read that Harrison Ford wasn't feeling well that day and couldn't handle a fight scene, so he ad-libbed the shooting and it stayed in the movie.    Too bad Tom Cruise felt just fine the day of his climactic fight scene.  

And maybe I missed it, but how exactly did Robert Duvall get talked into appearing in the final shootout?    It's always great to see Duvall as he reunites with Cruise for the first time since Days Of Thunder (1990), another forgettable genre picture.    The finale takes place in a quarry where The Zec's real estate company does its shady business.    The lawyer is taken hostage.    The quarry is vast and allows Reacher to infiltrate the area almost undetected while things blow up all around.    Is this really how the real estate company envisioned its master plan concluding?