Where it's always 1959 and the knuckles don't come any hairier

Rating: 5/10 (8 January 2014)

Admittedly, I watched the movie as sociological research. I wanted to see
a) what the Tea Party is filling its head with
b) how Mr. Scientology is holding up as a brand; and
c) the brilliant Werner Herzog showing these amateurs what's what
And I was not disappointed. Like all vigilante stuff, the film is at heart a right wing fantasy draped on the idea that the law is for wimps. It devotes lots of time in the second reel to lecturing us about how defense attorneys always let bad guys off. Wouldn't you like to frog-march those namby-pamby criminal-coddlers into the homes of the grieving families so they could be taught a thing or two and maybe even threatened with guns? If you bought a ticket for this, you got your money's worth.
There is a military theme, too, given less screen time but persistent and more important. It isn't quite what you'd expect from the movie's branding (fearless Cruise next to an American flag). In fact, without spoiling anything, I'll say the movie taps into popular discontent about the Iraq war. In the Reacher character, McQuarrie gives us an ex-soldier who, in a heartfelt if hackneyed speech, reveals he isn't sure his service was worth it. To Reacher, it doesn't seem that the freedom he spent years defending actually exists. Now, this was mildly interesting -- existential dread rumbling beneath the giddy bloodshed and maniacal beatings. I don't know whether it's true to the source material or an overlay by McQuarrie, but it certainly livened things up for me. Then, predictably, it was right back to the clichés. It must be a bitter pill for the director who, in another life, actually made a film of some merit in The Usual Suspects.
Cruise inhabits his new post-matinée idol skin pretty well. The movie is at pains to tell us he isn't past it -- McQuarrie (at his star's insistence?) including a number of reaction shots in which every woman who sees Jack Reacher walk by swings her head and starts to drool. This is fairly desperate, and unnecessary. Cruise is at his best when looking troubled, worn out, unconvinced. Kubrick brought this out of him much better than anyone else, but Kubrick was stuck with the pretty boy actor. Years later, Mr. Scientology, famously battered about by real life in recent times, is convincingly unpleasant when allowed to be. The Lee Child readers seem troubled by the fact he isn't their dream of a 250-lb. "killing machine," but as his face turns to leather Cruise has in him the potential to be the next Charles Bronson.
The most interesting aspect is the way McQuarrie has cribbed from 1970s Hollywood. It's kind of an awkward fit to the material. He has the look of the French Connection down in places, but not its soul; he isn't Friedkin and Cruise is no Hackman, and as for Lee Child... So, Cruise swaggers about sounding like a guy transported into the present from 1959 --conveniently enough, he's skipped every part of the last 50 years that didn't fit his True Grit world view. The anachronisms pile up: we have a woman defense attorney who is required to let her mouth hang slack as Reacher explains to her, scene after scene, how it's really a man's world and only he has the answers. And of course she'll need saving eventually. Here the movie reaches out to reassure 21st century males hankering for the good old days. Boys, it says, we're back in charge!
The one and only grace note comes when Herzog lights up the screen, albeit looking as if he'd just been decomposing in lye. As the brooding ex-Siberian prisoner who gnawed off his fingers to stay alive, he puts in an afternoon or two of acting that simply changes everything around him. One minute we are in a mostly-competent commercial vehicle meant to give a fading big star work in his declining years. The next we have this odd, hideous genius stepping out of the shadows like a latter day Orson Welles as Welles did when he'd go slumming in junk for pay. His milk-white eye hanging in a haggard face, and his nightmare voice, are the best parts of the film. I recommend fast-forwarding directly to his scenes.