Tinker Tailor Soldier Poser

Rating: Null/10 (29 April 2013)

I briefly dipped in the infostream the day of the Boston bombings, looking for a specific thing; sure enough, within hours there were calls of conspiracy, and of course chief among them cries for a 'false flag'. This right here is why the detective film matters to me, we are all detectives in life looking to apprehend governing truths which is a fundamental attribute of mind. It seems nothing can happen without it affirming the story of who you are. The political aspects are of little interest to me.
So a good detective film to my mind is one that attempts to shed light into how much of this apprehension of truth is mind itself. The Long Goodbye is near the top of my list of great films, next to several noir.
So this isn't for me, in the sense that there is no study in perception, just a plot. At best, it tries to sketch a political landscape: the soldier was manipulated, one of police or DA is in on this but not both, the bad guy is a corporation but headed by an ex-gulag prisoner exploiting holes in the free market. Our guy can straddle the law, because he's pursuing what's right, existing mysteriously outside the system.
It is all entirely too clean, for instance we follow the idealist lawyer as she pieces an 'objective' view of the victims of a mass shooting, the idea is that bodies are not crime statistics but had a life out there. See the shots as we glimpse into these lives on the day of the shooting, all clean and bright, all framed like life insurance ads. All were good folks being brave that day, striving to be better. But no, the sleuth reasons that two were having an affair, and even this subversion of fundamental goodness feels fabricated and squeaky clean.
What seals the deal for me is Cruise and his character. Both entirely too smug, but this is not the ironic Phil Marlowe effect where the cocksure PI thinks so far ahead he possibly invents part of the case, the joke being on him. Reacher simply has the answers, he is without flaw or irony. And he has the chiseled body of the action hero. There's even a scene, tangential but indicative of sensibility, where he poses without a shirt on next to the attractive lawyer, but instead of seducing, being so above it all, he tells her to go.
So here's a film that similarly has all the answers, but none that explain beyond the superficial mugging. It's a silly film.
At least Herzog seems to know this, playing up the voice we know as narrator of a cosmic creepiness.