Not bad

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2013)

Have you ever seen someone who you know deserved to rot in jail get away with it? What if they somehow wound up committing the exact same crime? Could you let them get away with that a second time? I doubt it.
When we first join the characters, we find ourselves in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A sniper attack ends the lives of five seemingly random people. With an abundance of evidence against him, the police arrest and charge former Army sharpshooter James Barr (played by Joseph Sikora). Rather than confess and throw himself on the mercy of the court, the way District Attorney Alex Rodin (played by Richard Jenkins) and his lead investigator, Detective Emerson (played by David Oyelowo) would like, he writes "find Jack Reacher" on a piece of paper and that's the last we hear from him for sometime. Jack Reacher (played by Tom Cruise) is a former military police officer who served with distinction and all but vanished from the earth once he left the service. The D.A. and lead investigator ask how they're supposed to find someone like that and just as one of the characters says "you don't find him, he finds you" he shows up at their office. By this time, perhaps as a result of misconduct on the part of police and prison officials, James Barr is in a coma. His lawyer, Helen Rodin (defense attorney and daughter of the District Attorney played by Rosamund Pike) introduces herself to Jack Reacher and asks him to work as her investigator. Reacher tells Rodin how he and Barr first became acquainted. Barr, a sharpshooter who never fired a single shot during a battle scenario, has been trained for a task he was never ordered to attempt. He, out of desperation, kills several men who are completely unknown to him. As it turns out, those men were civilian contractors and Barr killed them as they were concluding a rape rally. Barr was acquitted and Reacher, certain he will commit a similar crime in the future, vowed to be there when he did.
I wouldn't call myself a Tom Cruise fan. I've seen films he was in that I liked (examples include A Few Good Men, the Mission: Impossible series, and Collateral) and I've seen him in movies I hated (Knight and Day, War of the Worlds, Vanilla Sky). I would consider myself a Rosamund Pike fan; however I have only seen two other films in which she appeared (Die Another Day and The Big Year). I wouldn't call Jack Reacher a masterpiece or some sort of reemergence of Cruise's career, but it was very entertaining and I'm glad I saw it. If you're an action fan, you should see it too.