Coming up short

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2013)

Which clown decided to put Tom Cruise in a film titled "Jack Reacher"? Tom Cruise can't reach anything. The guy's six inches. Seven inches tops. This puts most of the physical world outside of Tom Cruise's reach. Literally. Unless he's reaching for metaphysical stuff. Can Tom Cruise reach places with his mind?
Regardless, "Jack Reacher" stars Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, an ex Army Major who specialises in kicking butt. His mission? Solve a mystery regarding the deaths of several men and women by sniper fire. The problem? The dude is short.
"Jack Reacher" possesses one of the strangest opening acts in action movie history. Here director Christopher McQuarrie goes to extreme lengths to convince us that Cruise is an archetypal lone wolf, tough guy and one man army. The problem? The dude is short. When you need your camera three inches off the ground to make your tough guy look imposing, there is a problem.
McQuarrie then gives Cruise a series of one liners which are meant to sound witty and/or tough but which instead come across as being adorably silly. When a shop clerk asks to see some ID, Cruise offers to "show him the inside of an ambulance" instead. When a girl identifies herself as "Sandy", Cruise says "so was I, last week, on a beach in Florida". This is bad tough guy dialogue, the likes of which only a Clint Eastwood or Humphrey Bogart can sell. Why? Probably cos' they're tall.
Bizarrely, "Jack Reacher" stars Werner Herzog as its chief villain. Herzog's woefully miscast, and can't convey menace at all, but there's something fitting about the way his character's misfortunes align themselves with Herzog's own, wacky real life persona. Also co-starring is Rosamund Pike, who looks perpetually confused and seems to be participating in the cleavage Olympics. She sets up some of Cruise's more funny moments, in which the actor mocks his own vainglory. Elsewhere the film contains a number of good scenes, like an archetypal bar fight in which our hero "steps outside" to brawl with a group of hoodlums. The way Reacher dissects and works his way through an elaborate crime scene (five people were shot by a sniper alongside a river) is also interesting, though only in theory. The film later climaxes with a shoot-out at a quarry, and is bookended by two tasteless assassination sequences. In the first, we watch through a sniper-scope as a massacre occurs. In the second, Cruise assassinates the film's villain because turning up to court trials is apparently too much hassle. Like most action heroes, the guy's an extrajudicial badass, taking care of business then fading into the shadows. Like Nixon. Final scene? Cruise on a bus, about to beat up a punk for slapping a woman. The guy's a low-rent Batman, short bus and all.
6.9/10 – See Mamet's "Spartan".