Mystery Cum Action.

Rating: 6/10 (12 March 2016)

A man is laid up in a hospital bed, barely conscious, all signs pointing to his having been a sniper who killed four people at random on a Pittsburgh street. He's really stepped into it, though he can't remember any of it. All he can say is, "Get Jack Reacher." Jack Reacher is the drifter Tom Cruise, a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Superman.
The defense attorney, Rosamund Pike, locates him and hires him as an investigator, her intent being to prove that the accused shooter, Barr, is insane and so spare him the death penalty. Cruise does better than that. He proves that Barr is innocent and uncovers a corporative conspiracy run by the estimable Werner Herzog. Of course there are dozens of tense moments along the way, plenty of action, and numerous deaths.
As mysteries go, this one is kind of interesting, although Cruise's intuition sometimes resembles Lieutenant Columbo's in that it leads mistakenly to the correct conclusion. Example: Cruise considers the four victims of the mass murder and discovers that two of them had planned to meet at the spot because they were having an affair. "So two of the victims weren't there at random." Well, actually they were. They weren't TOGETHER by accident, but they were at the location by chance. In any case they have nothing to do with the incident.
Cruise's character is one of those unconquerable martial arts expert. His opponent barely lay a glove on him while he disables them at light speed or, when he's serious about it, breaks their necks. It was all nicely done by Matt Damon in "The Bourne Identity." A car chase at high speed is a requirement for any exciting movie these days. They all represent variations on a theme established in "Bullit" in 1968. Even the sounds of the full race cams are the same.
Cruise is taciturn, impenetrable, without a back story. As the author of the novel on which this story is based, Lee Child, has admitted, the character is an archetype long established in fiction as the mysterious stranger who rides into town and untangles the mess, and then leaves. It was presented superbly in "Shane" in 1952. I think F. C. S. Northrop calls this the high mimetic mode of narrative. The hero is better than the rest of us but still subject to the laws of nature. Hitchcock preferred to deal in the low mimetic with heros no better than the rest of us, who found themselves swept up in events beyond their control.
Bonus points for a director, Christopher McQuarrie, who refuses to surrender to the modern but unstylish tendency to wobble the camera during action scenes. Not a bit of it. The editing is fast but you can tell who's doing what to whom. Which, for some reason, reminds me that there are no sex scenes. Even THAT is a refreshing novelty these days.
The director does have a bent though, and it's conspicuous on those few occasions when he uses it. The scene opens with a person speak to someone behind the camera. We don't know who it is. The camera slowly moves around behind the speaker until the other person is revealed. Sometimes it works. "Hey, that's ROBERT DUVAL behind the counter!" Other times there seems to be no reason for it because the listener isn't a big surprise. The tactic doesn't make the viewer tense, just impatient.
As action movies go, this one stands up to the rest of the genre. I was sorry to see Herzog play a heartless heavy because he's such an innovative director himself, and a terribly nice guy in person.