Soul-less Throwaway Seen This a 100 Times Before

Rating: 2/10 (5 June 2014)

Well, of course any A list movie with such a cast and director will have all the basics down pat, except it's a soul-less, unoriginal product that doesn't elevate the audience, at least the thinking ones who appreciate something more than a macho violence fest. It is designed to appeal to the action movie crowd, you know the skinhead tattooed types at the gym or on loud motorcycles who haven't read a book since school stamped their parchment.
We have Cruise being Mr. Badass Bullet Chewing Ex Army West Point MP lifer Jack Reacher, who resigned from the Army and lives off the grid with just the clothes on his back. You'd think a lifer like him would at least have a duffel bag with a change of clothes and a toilet kit, but he shows up in Pittsburgh empty handed on a bus. At first he's there to help convict some Army killer he pursued in the past for some mass shooting that happened in Iraq. His character is such macho bs, and so worn out, but that doesn't matter to the audience who apparently need a really smart guy, who can figure all the angles everyone else missed and who can also kill 10 armed men barehanded. It is like Cruise got into character in some BS pseudo-artsy Jap gore fest like "The Last Samurai" and never got back to reality. Since Mr Perfect is also the producer of this as well as the man who turned Mission Impossible into another generic ultra violent chase scene thriller, I think Cruise really imagines himself as a Reacher clone
So of course, we know the shooter, or the guy we thought was the shooter, wasn't the bad guy. And we knew that one of the stuffed shirts we met in the beginning was prolly in the pay of the bad guys. And we knew that there was going to be tons of sophisticated weapons and fancy shooting, along with a chase scene involving every bad ass guy's wet dream, a 1968 Chevy Malibu SS 396 4 speed, driven by the master at everything who is, I guess, a good driver in reality. The common iconic 60s muscle car is a stand in for the lameness and unoriginality of the character and the rest of the plot.
There is a really bad guy, a Russian, natch, called the Zek, played by a German, Werner Herzog. He is really bad, like he chewed his fingers off to save himself in a Soviet gulag. Then I find out that the real target of this mass shooting, and the subsequent mayhem and expense to cover it up. was someone these ultra evil, ultra well financed guys could have dealt with in their sleep. It reminds me of using a shotgun to kill a fly.
I mean these evil guys are so bad, that when they paid some local not-so-evil hood to drive Reacher off by stomping him, which failed of course, the really evil people not only killed their local contact guy, but the five hapless petty criminals their local guy hired for a $100/piece. Heck, once they killed their local contact, there would have been no way for Terminator Reacher to trace it back. But the plots of movies like this are there mainly to provide the set up for the next set of homicides.
Then the movie had this old Marine - "young" Army guy bonding scene at a shooting range. The old guy was Duvall, wdf. Natch, once we got over his crustiness, you knew they would bond so well that after one meeting the old man would drive 200 miles to help the Terminator shoot all the bad guys dead in some night quarry construction site shoot out scene.
I hate using the term fascist, because it is so overworked and misused, as well as the two big heroes in the end were operating alone, not part of some storm battalion. But it was fascist, in that it espoused these ultra conservative, ultra macho military trained militaristic guys are the key to help us clean up society. For sure, we do need these types sometime, but in movies & TV today it seems the message we get is that this is the way to deal with all the bad parts of life. IT is all some Manichean struggle where soul-less, rootless good guys can waste all sorts of ultra heinous, well equipped and almost as competent bad guys then walk away for a good breakfast as Dennys. I know, this is just supposed to be escapist fare, but maybe we should ask ourselves if trash like this from A listers is causing so many people to be alienated and go over the edge. Yeah, yeah, 99.99% of the people who watched this won't do anything sadistic or insane, but what about that .01%?
PS: I just made the connection between this movie and some similar stinker set in Pittsburgh, "Striking Distance". That cheesy Bruce Willis, over the top macho action flick got more than its share of razzies from the fans & critics. If you take that movie as parody of its genre which it is, it is more palatable than this macho militaristic cowboy sadistic nonsense.